


Balance

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: All The Smut Tags Will Follow, Ben Is a Snapchat Ho, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Eventual Smut, Fluff and Angst, Improper Use of Social Media, Leia is Mayor of New York, M/M, Modern AU, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexting, Slow Burn, Snoke is Bad News, Soft Kylux, The First Order is A Bar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-06-04 06:55:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6646762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben Organa-Solo is a haunted ex war-hero, trying to find his way in New York City with his former army buddy Phasma. Breandán Hux is a PhD candidate in theoretical physics who is more lonely than he wants to admit. These three staff The First Order, a bar fronting a dark business run by the seedy underbelly boss called Snoke. Ben and Hux are powerfully drawn to each other, but old wounds, instability, and pride may keep them apart, and if they don't escape Snoke, they may go down in flames with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four Flights of Stairs

Stairs. Four flights of them.

Part of Ben Solo's thought process when agreeing to occupy Phasma's open room in the burgeoning Lower East Side neighborhood had been that stairs would be good for him. They would get him back into shape after months in a hospital bed. 

That does not, however, feel like the case in this moment. Today, even with the help of his cousin Rey and her... whatever they weres... Poe and Finn, it feels like torture. Like Jacob's ladder. The endless toil to death only to be yanked back from the brink and have to repeat the process, over and over. 

_ How many trips was this now,  _ he wonders as he shoves the ground floor door open again and stoops to replace the block that someone keeps dislodging from beneath the frame. It was hard enough to manage furniture up without an elevator, but to have to open the damn door with a key every time...

Bending over hurts. Fuck, everything hurts. 

He straightens with a grunt, and catches his cousin peering up at him with an expression he knows well. Concern. 

Rey Skywalker blinks up at him, her lips tucked into a tight frown. “Ben. You need a break,” she murmurs, pulling her oversized coat tighter around her shoulders.

A frigid breeze funnels through the street and she shivers, still unaccustomed to the cruelty of a New York winter. Certain nights had touched upon freezing back in Jakku, though growing up in the Arizonan desert, somehow, had been kinder than this.

“Ben,” she repeats, hazel eyes flicking down the length of his face.

He frowns at her in turn, narrowing his eyes in a mock glare. He reaches out and ruffles her hair, which he knows she hates. All the more reason to do it. 

"I'm fine, kid," he says. He knows she hates that too. Being called a kid. But at nineteen, fresh faced and still able to gawk in wide-eyed wonder at the world around them, she was just that to Ben. He'd picked up the name "Kylo Ren" in the army... an amalgamation of "Ben" and his refusal to answer to "Solo," because that was his father's last name. The full story behind it was mildly embarrassing, but that is usually how someone picks up a nickname in the service. 

Rey, however, still called him Ben, and probably always would.

The vision of innocence peering up at him twists into shallow anger. “I’m not a kid,” she raises her upper lip and smacks his arm lightly, mirroring some semblance of the temper that Ben had been known for in their family. 

He wraps one long arm around her and smashes her small frame into all six feet and three inches of his. As he does, Rey's... boyfriend?... passes them with a box and a glance of concern at the cornered Rey, which flickers to Ben in a conveyance of distrust he knows well. 

He passes, however, up the stairs, and Ben's eyes flick to the other man present. Poe Dameron, the rather dashing son of Chapuys (Chewie) Dameron, Han Solo's lifelong best friend. An Air Force brat, Ben had grown up with Poe, and while Ben had once entertained thoughts that spoke of more than friendship toward the handsome pilot, things had gone in a decidedly different direction in his absence.

"So, what exactly is all... this?" Ben asks as he watches Poe unload a crate of records from Rey's pickup truck.

Rey follows his gaze and she arches a brow. “That’s Poe,” she says dryly. “He’s unloading your junk from my car. We’re helping you move. Are you alright?”

Ren glances down at her and raises an eyebrow. "You know what I mean. You. Him." He gestures with a tilt of his head back over his shoulder in the direction Finn had gone.  _ "And _ him?" Rey brought something out in Kylo, something protective and familiar in some way he couldn’t quite explain and that wasn’t a part of the character most people saw.

She rolls her eyes and waves a hand dismissively. “Listen, I don’t need your judgment. Yes. That’s all I’m telling you until you drop the tone.”

"I'm not judging! Damn. If I could have two men at once..." he begins, but trails off with a wide grin at Rey's darkening expression.

Rey’s rounded cheeks flush and she bites back a sneer. “It’s not… like that, okay?”

"Mmmhm," Kylo muses noncommittally as Poe crosses the street and flashes him that glorious white smile. He just raises an eyebrow at his old friend, squashing Rey a little closer, and then his attention is distracted by a moving van that pulls up alongside the vehicles Rey, Finn, and Poe had brought to help him move today. 

Rey blinks as the sleek black van pulls along the curb, meanwhile attempting to wriggle out of Ben’s impossible grip. “Oh geeze. It’s about to get crowded,” she mumbles, drinking in the decaling that boasts an austere emblem above the words  _ Empire Movers _ .  

"Maybe it'll be another pretty boy you can add to your collection," Ben quips, glancing at the truck and then smirking down at her.

Rey smacks his arm harder with a scowl. “You’re so crass, she wrinkles her nose, trying in vain to slip from his grasp.

Ren barely registers Rey's small hand as it collides with his arm, and with a grunt of dissatisfaction, he says: "Back to work, padawan. We've got two hours of daylight left." 

He releases Rey and takes the six steps down to the sidewalk, trying not to contemplate the fact that he needs to hold the handrail. Trying not to think about the crash, the twisted metal, the smell of burning flesh, the agonizing pain that even now lingers in his leg, his back. No, he will not think of that. 

Ren brushes past the tail end of a passing yellow cab, sensing Rey in his wake, and begins to cross the street to the vehicles bearing all the possessions that remain in his life after five years abroad. Besides the furniture he'd bought from Ikea this morning, there were the personal effects from his bedroom in his parents' home in the Adirondacks. Records he missed. Books he'd read until the covers were coming off. Stacks of sketchpads that were a silent movie of his childhood. Probably all things he would have left, if his mother had not been in the city, where she was now mayor, and his father stationed…who the fuck knew where with the Air Force. The trip he'd taken with Rey, Poe, and Finn (and BB8, their overly enthusiastic and rather round corgi) would never have happened if Ren had needed to face his parents. 

That thought recedes along with other, more recent memories as he silently tells himself to  _ let it go _ , which is a necessary mantra, even if sometimes elusive. As he does, his attention is drawn to the door of the moving truck as it swings open, and then to the creature that emerges from it. 

Breandán Hux exits the passenger seat of the van with a refined sense of apathy, thudding soundlessly onto the pavement. He instinctively fishes through the pocket of his peacoat, extracting a slim pack of Parliaments and a silver lighter. Slipping a cigarette into his mouth, he flicks an impassive gaze over to Ren. Their eyes meet briefly and Hux blinks, uninterested, suckling on the cigarette as his eyes trail down the stranger’s frame. Drinking in broad shoulders hidden beneath a dark grey coat, his gaze lowers to the hem that stops mid-thigh, and he pauses to assess the man’s height. 

Hux is fully aware he’s staring, steely grey gaze lifting back up to pierce the bloke. He belatedly notices the thin, lengthy scar bisecting his curiously bold features, though his eyes do not linger. Instead, he offers a curt, blank nod, smoke curling from his lips, and promptly turns away.  

Ren's long stride falters somewhat beneath the weight of the other man's stare, steps slowing so that he can drink in the long legs, the alabaster skin with its dusting of freckles, the eyes that are, from paces away, tiny sun-sparked pools of pale emerald. He sees those eyes flick across his scar, the one that shames him so, with barely a hint of notice, and he appreciates it, though instantly wonders, self-consciously, if it is simply the entirety of Ren's face that has been assessed and dismissed. He is distracted from that thought by the way the cigarette slips between the other’s lips, and the nod before he turns away that Ren means to return, only to be startled by the  _ blaaaappp _ of a car horn. 

Ren holds his hand up to the driver, biting his own lip against a grin as he picks up his pace, crossing the street to circle the moving van. He risks a glance at this flame haired boy, wondering if perhaps he noticed he had managed to so smoothly stop traffic on a New York street.

Hux drags from the cigarette and welcomes the mild buzz. 

His sixth of the day. 

He furrows his brow, considering the thermochemical decomposition of tobacco that sinks claws into his willpower and siphons from his bank account. Pyrolysis, decomposition of a compound through heat, had always fascinated him, and even as it shackles him to chemical addiction it’s not so much the process but that sweet, heady kiss of dependence. Whether it’s the psychoactive substance or sating his oral fixation he hums around the cigarette, parsing his brain for that PubMed article he’d been forwarded in a thinly veiled attempt at concern.

He couldn’t be fucked to remember it. Quite literally, in fact, as the biochemistry student he’d been presenting his ass to had grown so cumbersome with proselytizing about  _ health _ and  _ wellbeing _ that Hux had stubbed one out on his chest. Post-coital too; an utter waste of one American dollar, two quarters, and eighteen minutes on all fours. There ended that particular affair, though the breadth Hux’s patience for others is measured solely in inches. It is his most appraisal worthy unit of measurement, followed by dollars.  

Even now as he idly pats along his chest, he judges that his pack is nearly finished. Christ on sale, because those Parliaments certainly are not. Swiveling his head down the block, Hux pauses to note how many steps could be calculated between the nearest bodega and his new front door.

Eighty-four, he gleans. It would have to do.

Turning once more, he inspects his new building idly, not that it’s foreign to him by any means. January marks his eighth month as shift manager at The First Order, the shitstain of a bar that has sustained, if not worsened, his vices. To hell with spending night after night sifting through his grading pile and picking apart that fetid mound of bullshit for any scraps of value. Each examination, each laughable measure of intelligence, suffered beneath the wrath of a red pen and his wilting resolve because God fucking help him if he had to endure another semester of playing shepherd for Introduction to Physics. Admittedly, his academic stipend took a hit when he stopped TA-ing, though he wasn’t accepted into Columbia Engineering to coddle idiots. He’s already spent eight years in this bloody city, and soon enough he’ll bear the fruits of his labor with a doctorate in engineering science. 

Hux glances at the black staircase leading down to The First Order, like an oily spine sprawling toward a sinister maw of chaos. A typical night inside the Order ages him immeasurably, though he has endured this particular brand of bullshit solely for the substantial paychecks. Dubiously substantial, because numbers are his trade and it doesn’t take a goddamn PhD candidate to compute the inconsistencies. Yet he’s never cared to ask questions. Manager Snoke and the Order are a means to an end, and if that end is floating his own pretty little ass in a half-price Lower East Side studio, then let the funds or throats or whichever in between hemorrhage. Questions are for fools: for bright-eyed, bushy-tailed children nosing around in dark corners and undergraduate recitation, too blind or dumb to realize that truth is quantitative and fed in increments. 

He is simply a scholar, one who cuts corners as sharply as his glances, and if it means mopping up spittle and slop for setting him ahead of the curve then so be it. He never cared to hand them out anyhow; may as well take the one he was given.

Hux passes another glance over at the man now stopping traffic, lifts a brow, and swiftly turns to extract his cat Millicent from the passenger seat. 

Ben, who is biting the inside of his cheek against a smile as he rounds the moving van, catches the imperiously arched eyebrow, and notices the near translucent eyelashes. As he circles the back of the moving van now blocking in Rey's truck, he thinks to himself how  _ long _ it's been since he could let himself stare at an attractive man. 

There had been a time where he could turn such a gaze on Poe Dameron, whose whistling he now hears crossing the street behind him, followed a cheerful "Well  _ hey _ there buddy," that Ben suspects is Poe addressing the new arrival. The delivery is typical of his old friend, and once brief flame: he is a miserable flirt, not one to care if it was to his detriment or anyone else's sense of propriety. 

He lifts a box of books from the truck bed, and winces at the long stripe of scorching red pain along his side. The stitches are only weeks out, the flesh still tender. The ribs beneath, two of which he'd broken, are still sore, and he shouldn't be doing any of this. 

Cradling the box in his arms, he turns and encounters his old flame, now his cousin's, and Poe immediately stretches his arms out for the burden, hands clutching at it and trying to pull it away. 

"Lemme get that, Ben," he says, only barely managing to keep the touch of unwanted concern from his voice.

Ben grinds his teeth, swallowing the biting reply, and merely turns his body, shielding the box and tugging it from Poe's grasp.

"I've got it." 

Poe seems to understand, and withdraws his hands, holding them placatingly with palms forward only long enough to pass him, whistling some tune again that Ben doesn’t recognize. 

Hefting his box, Ben circumnavigates the moving van again, and comes face to face with a scene from a cartoon. The quite handsome flame-haired ginger is now reduced to something comical which immediately draws a burst of uncharacteristically boisterous laughter from Ben. The man is stooped over a striped orange cat, finger under its chin while he speaks too softly to hear. The cat is a tiny runt of a thing which is encased in a red halter leash with tiny winking rhinestones. It is, without a doubt, the most ridiculous thing Ben has ever seen. 

“This is our new home, pretty girl,” Hux purrs around his cigarette and receives several mewls in exchange. Millie nuzzles his fingers, though suddenly startles at the thick notes of laughter spilling from the man several feet away. 

Hux snaps up, eyes needling the boorish stranger. “Can I help you?” he grinds out. 

Ben’s face flushes slightly at the hawkish stare, but laughter is still bubbling in his chest as he comments: “You have a cat on a leash.” 

“Your skills of perception are marvelous. You deserve a medal,” Hux spits, upper lip curling.

Ben’s brows immediately dip down, shadowing hazel eyes that are near golden in the winter sunlight.  _ Medal _ . For a moment everything on the street disappears, blends into a memory filled with fire and blood and smoke and the screams of… 

He starts, a hand grasping his arm, and he is jerking it away violently, and the box of books pressed to his chest is falling to the ground.  _ Books. _

Not shell casings. Not bodies. 

Ben sucks in a deep breath and glances at Rey, who is still clutching his arm, and he finds himself quivering, his stomach roiling. 

Hux witnesses this lout spill books along the pavement and he huffs a short laugh. It catches in his mouth, not quite expelling from his lungs, and he suckles harder from the cigarette. What a fucking treat.

Though he is suddenly met with an incensed glower and some pitiful excuse for a young woman steamrolling her way into his personal space. She is hidden beneath a coat that is far too large for her thin shoulders, bundled and fuming and snarling inches below his raised brows.

“He has six, actually,” this gangly creature informs him with slick razors for teeth.

“Oh my,” Hux muses, stopping himself from using her wide forehead as an ashtray. “Convey my congratulations to your ball and chain.” 

“You’re rude,” she says, eyes alight. “Awful and rude.”

“And you’re wasting oxygen particles. Mind your own business,” Hux retorts, blowing a steady stream of smoke into her face. 

Ben has been witness to Rey's flashfire temper before, and while a part of him wishes to let it sear this pretty jackass to the bone for his unmerited caustic demeanor, it remains that Ben does not know this man nor trust him. Phasma has informed him that the beast moving into the newly renovated one-bedroom across the hall from them was the shift manager at The First Order, and from her tales, the place was nefarious at best. 

He knows Rey well enough not to engage her in a power struggle, so instead, he sinks into a crouch, righting the box he's dropped, and pulls the only string he can think of to diffuse this situation. Picking up a book, he says without needing to affect pain: 

"Help me with these, Rey. Prick isn't worth it." 

Much to Hux’s amusement, she begins to hack and wheeze, swatting at the air with a new degree of fury. Though without warning, she snatches the cigarette from his fingers and whips it to the ground, even as the fool crouched on the pavement calls out to her. Hux watches in increasing disbelief as she grinds it beneath the heel of her boot.

“Yeah,” Rey agrees, turning sharply to tend to her damsel in distress.

Hux stares after her, hatred sinking into his bones. So he would be living next a squawking turkey and the village idiot. Fantastic.   

Ben tries to suppress his laughter, but nonetheless it comes out in a low wheeze. 

"Meet my cousin, Rey Skywalker," he offers to the other man, who is even now pinkening across his high cheek bones with what Ben imagines to be fury. 

There is the clattering of the movers as they roll in the back door of the moving van, the grating of ramp being pulled down, and then a boot crunches pavement behind him.

He hears Poe's voice say: "There a problem here?" 

Hux vibrates with rage, a crimson flush spreading across his cheeks. There goes another fucking dollar fifty because of some self-entitled cockroach rutting against the needle of a moral compass. For a moment, he considers squashing Rey Skywalker and her dense cousin beneath the soles of his boots. 

Cunts. The both of them.

His eyes snap up to the olive-skinned man approaching and he ignores the question, leaving the scavengers to sift through the miserable excuse for a book collection on the ground.

Rey crouches before him, handing him his hardcover copy of  _ Heir to the Empire, _ which he'd stood in line at Comic Con for hours to have signed by the hero of his childhood, Timothy Zahn. The dust jacket was worn, torn across the front, handled a hundred times. Ben happens to glance up as he placed the book back into the box, and catches his new, vitriolic neighbor staring at him with dark feline humor. Scattered across the ground are copies of  _ Dune, A Fire Upon the Deep, Ender's Game, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy _ ... a telling collection for a twenty-three year old man who has kept these relics from his childhood; portals into which he had escaped his lonely life. 

Stuffing the last of the books into the box, he lifts it from the ground, refusing to grimace at the agony in his side. Murmuring his thanks to his cousin, he does his best not to limp to the stairs leading into the walk-up, but that is all he can manage. He is forced to set the box down once more on the stoop, and then he eases himself gingerly beside it. The breath that he exhales, a frosty cloud of vapor in the chilling January air, comes more rapidly than he would like, and he balls a fist at his knee, nails digging into his palm.

Meanwhile, Hux fishes through his coat, teeth clenched, and rips his pack out. He jams one of his last cigarettes into his mouth and huffs, turning to bark orders at the movers. His fingers are shaking. He needs the nicotine, a rush, anything. He lights it and suckles from it like a lifeline, finally departing from this sad spectacle as he picks Millie up and approaches a man dressed in black.

“Fourth floor, apartment B,” he commands, placing his keys into a mover’s sweaty palm. 

The man nods quickly and Hux glides across the street, chin raised, praying for the end of this godforsaken day.

The afternoon toils endlessly on; or at least it feels endless, for every trip up the stairs leaves Ben more and more winded, and with it comes a burgeoning sense of frustration. He is not bitter, or resentful of his companions. Not at Poe, whose served his four years in the Air Force, flew fighter jets Ben was always sure that he himself was not smart enough to test for. Not of Finn, who he hardly knew, but who was good to Rey. And certainly not of Rey, who would fight the Taliban with her bare fists for him. 

And yet he does border on dejection, self pity, which he hates, for he cannot simply overpower these new flaws of the flesh. His other shortcomings can be hidden, polished, focused elsewhere, but he simply cannot make his body do what he wishes it to, despite his relative youth. 

He pauses on the stoop after several hours of toiling up and down the stairs one box or piece of furniture at a time, trying not to notice Poe's ever-cheerful whistling or Finn's awkward attempts at a smile or Rey's look of loving concern as they pass him while he rests. 

Sighing, he tugs a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, and finds himself gazing at the obnoxious red-head and his petulant tabby-on-a-rope. They've been within eyesight of one another for most of the afternoon, as three boys barely out of high school lug up enough furniture and boxes to fill a museum, but they have not spoken, not caught the others' eyes. 

It's a pity, Ben thinks, cracking open a lighter and dragging the flame, because the other man has paid attention to several other things that pique Ben’s curiosity, besides the quality and care of the work the movers are doing. Such as Poe's ass. More than once. Ben can't blame him, but it might have been interesting. It is the first time in five years Ben can be free to feel interested. 

Indeed, Hux has been pitching lecherous glances at the cheerful one’s ass. Finally done away with his pack and significantly calmer, Hux’s eyes wander, shamelessly drinking in that dusky skin, the black curls brushing over his sweat-laden forehead. He considers testing a line or two, though that thought quickly dissipates as he watches Poe bound down the stairs and clap his comrade on the arm. The one they call Finn. The little shrike is nowhere to be seen, and her struggling cousin has stopped for his third break of the afternoon.

“Hey, buddy,” Poe beams, moving his fingers up to brush the man’s jawline. “Jacket still looks good on you.”

More than a comrade. A godforsaken day indeed.

Ben's eyes are trained on this interaction, and he happens to catch what appears to be a disappointed glower as the still nameless stranger's eyes sweep away with a sigh and an upward roll. Ben catches them as the man approaches the steps, cat following with a glare, and lifts the corner of his lips in an expression he hopes says,  _ I noticed that. _

Hux simply sneers at him, throwing the butt of his cigarette onto the sidewalk before scaling the stoop. Millie patters after him and he pauses to survey his nearly empty moving van across the street. 

Nearly done. Excellent.

Ben inhales, purposefully turning his head so that he doesn’t blow a cloud of smoke in the man’s face, though when he turns back the smirk is still there. 

“I’m Ben.” 

Hux blinks at him twice. “Hello.”

Ben notices the crumpled, empty pack of cigarettes in the as yet nameless man’s fist, notices the white knuckles, the cat that reflects his owner’s mood with ears laid back along its head, eyes saucer round. On a whim, he holds his nearly full pack out, for he only smokes when he feels he might faint otherwise. 

Hux’s mouth twitches, though he holds an impassive expression. “Are you sure your cousin won’t confiscate this from me?” he asks with the faintest inflection, reaching out to accept the offer.

A smile blooms fully on Ben’s mouth, more in amusement of the memory of Rey snatching that perfectly good cigarette from those soft lips. 

“She’ll behave. If you do.”

“Afraid that’s a tall order,” Hux murmurs under his breath, lighting the brand new cigarette between his lips.

His tenth of the day.

He eyes Ben and allows the smokes to languidly curl out from his mouth, lips parted, unguarded. His tilts his head to blow it up toward a wintry grey sky and his shoulders slacken. Thank fuck for nicotine.

“Cheers,” he says, raising his burning olive branch.  

Ben regards his face, noticing the way those green eyes have deepened in the coming evening. They change color, like his own. It is an odd thing to have in common. Maybe. He sucks a lungful of bolstering nicotine and  says around the inhale, voice constricted: 

“You got a name?” 

“Yes,” Hux smirks.

Ben huffs his smoke out slowly, tilting his face up to hide his smile. When he looks back, he is covering the lower half of his face with twin fingers and the cigarette perched before his lips.

“Do you like to make people beg?” 

“Didn’t I already mention you were astute?” Hux feigns an innocent look.

“I wasn’t sure you were taking me seriously at the time” Ben says, sending another cloud of smoke and vapor into the air. 

He wants to press further, but Ben does not beg. Not for anyone. He turns his gaze down the street, watching people walking, hunched in coats, hands in pockets, scarves. Exhaust from cars lingering like cigarette smoke along the street.

Hux snorts, trying not to roll his eyes into the back of his skull. “Not so perceptive, then.”

Ben glances at him, ascertaining the line they are walking, subtle and ill-defined, for he’s experienced it often enough in the service. 

_ Yes your assumption is correct. Maybe I’m interested, maybe I’m not. _

“More so than you think.” 

Hux grunts dismissively and watches Millie spread out along his feet.

Ben reaches down to stroke the cat, but she immediately arches her head and flattens her ears, hissing. Ben draws his hand back, glances up at the narrow figure catching the fading sunlight above him. 

“You two have something in common, at least.” 

“Do you expect all creatures to immediately bend to your will?” Hux scoffs, reaching to drag a fingertip down her spine. It earns him a dull purr as she slackens beneath his touch.

Ben glances at him, thinking that yes, he does, and he has. With a two point five million dollar machine whose controls are caressed in his hands, with 50 caliber machine guns mounted in the doorways at his comrades’ command. Yes, he has expected it. 

For a moment his eyes glaze, and he is there again, and then he blinks. 

“No,” he answers, because it is the truth. Then he rallies from that cage, and smirks up at his new neighbor. “But it’s fun to try.” 

“And if you fail?” Hux muses, guarding his expression.

“You get your eyes clawed out?” He takes another drag of of cigarette, noticing his neighbor’s is vastly more depleted, and offers the pack again. 

“Are you going to tell me your name, or not?”

Hux sighs. Denser than a bag of bricks, the poor sod. Though his gaze falls upon the full pack and his mouth waters, tongue fat, itching for another drag. 

“Hux,” he trades, a name for a vice.

Ben simply hands him the pack, not caring for it anymore. He brushes those slender fingers, and notes they are not so soft as he imagined. As though perhaps… Hux… has worked. Strived. Surely rocks-glasses and liquor bottles do not harden a man’s hands. He opens his mouth to ask Hux what it is he does with his time outside of the First Order, when Rey bounds out of the open doorway beyond.

Hux glances at the pack in his palm, his brow beetling before he can ask the question. He glances up at the arrival of the shrike and sighs, pitching her a severe glare. 

“We done?” Ben asks, levering himself to his feet atop the box he’s left on the stoop. Peeling fingers around it and lifting, realizing he’s spent too much time flirting, poorly, with this ginger boy than doing his duty.

“Yep,” she nods, raising her arms up in a stretch. She twists, an audible snap cracking through her shoulders and she beams. “I’m starving.”

Ben follows her into the open apartment doorway, glancing back once, catching Hux’s eyes. He collides with the door jamb, curses beneath his breath, and consigns himself to stairs. 

Four flights.

Though he thinks about his cat-eyed new neighbor the entire time, and suddenly it is not so arduous. 


	2. The First Order

The bar is seedy, at best, nestled in the belly of a stairwell below the stoop of the apartment building. The door is a matte black, with only a symbol painted in red and white at the cross of the beams: an ambiguous hexagon surrounding a starburst. Within, the floors are old wood, scuffed and scarred like the bar, which is backed by the very stone foundation of the building itself. If spiderwebs were to nestle in the cracks between those stones, they would not be out of place. 

Booths line the walls, tables are scattered across the floor, and nothing matches. Shoved into one corner is what might pass as a stage, but is little more than a cheap plywood structure spray-painted black, babysitting a drumset, stands for guitars, and amplifiers. 

The light is dim, coming from hanging lamps, the glass shades of which are tinged red. Hux doesn’t mind the ambience; it brightens the pallor of his cheeks, picks out the dark shades in his hair, and makes him seem like the sort of vampire that belongs in this place: not looking for blood, but tips, however he has to get them.

The young man currently Hux's prey is practically draped over the bar, one hand curled around a vile concoction of vodka, blue curacao, and orange juice, which he is sipping through two tiny black stir straws. He has watery, half dazed blue eyes, and blonde hair that looks at though he'd coated his hand in gel, slicked it through in reverse, and left the house that way. 

"Soo, how long have you been working here?" he asks Hux, having to pitch his voice over the din of the music.

Hux glances at this abomination and his gut curls, namely from shock that fate hasn’t yet intervened to euthanize him.

“Half a year,” he says, leaning forward with a smirk.

He stares at this man as if he could cup him into his palm and lap from it, even now as his tongue licks kitten-delicate along his bottom lip. 

His patron is not so inebriated as to miss the gesture, and pupils expand as they are trained on Hux's lips, on the way his tongue makes them glisten. Emboldened by Hux's attention, he asks with a shit-eating grin: 

"Can you get away with drinking a shot on the job? I'm buying."  

If it’s one point five fluid ounces of hydrogen cyanide.

“For you? I’ll take my chances,” Hux purrs quietly. 

"Whatever you want," the young man says, wresting a wad of cash from the pocket of overtight jeans and peeling a twenty from the stack to lay against the counter. "That's for your drink and the rest for you." He says it with a note of conspiracy, as though this exchange is secret code for " _ and you know for what else. _ " 

Hux glimpses Andrew Jackson’s long face and hums at the sight of his old friend.  

“Thank you  _ so _ much,” he murmurs breathlessly, lifting two emerald saucers to pierce the bloke’s open expression. 

He flashes a practiced smile, one steeped in reverence, before turning to fetch a half-filled bottle of Jameson. As he pours out a double shot for himself, he glances up at the man and bites his lip. “What’s your name?” he asks, as if he’s begging for a secret. 

"Matt," the man grins. "I'm a radiological technician over at the hospital. Do you live around here?" He leaves the folded bills on the counter as though this were a game of twenty questions with prize money attached.

Five figures. Associate’s degree. Blindingly blonde. Next. 

“I do. To you, Matt,” Hux murmurs, pressing the shot to his lips. He tips it back, holding this idiot’s gaze as the liquor burns a path down his throat. With a slow, deliberate swallow, he taps the glass against the bar and finishes with a quiet moan.

Matt the radiological technician is just peeling away another twenty dollar bill, eyes glittering, as though such chump change would next reveal just how close to here Hux resides, when suddenly a presence is looming beside him. 

Looming is precisely the word, for if the woman is an inch, she is six feet and three of them, with white blonde hair and a tank top with tattoos for sleeves. She is made all the more fierce by the nose ring and the glaring stare as she wedges her tall frame into the seat beside Hux's forthcoming patron.

She tilts her head, indicating the open space of the dive behind them, while thwacking him on the back companionably. The motion causes the man to wheeze and jerk forward under the force of it.

"Give us a minute, would ya buddy? I promise I'll give him back." 

Hux's evening cash-cow opens his mouth to perhaps bleat a protest, but downward drawn brows from his new companion are sufficiently discouraging. With a gulp and a glance at Hux, Matt the technician scrabbles his cash from the bar top and nearly falls from his stool in his haste to put space between them.

“Thank fuck for you,” Hux coughs, turning to fiddle with the register before pocketing the ten. “Need some medicine?” he smirks at Phasma.

Phasma glances over her shoulder at the retreating man, then turns back. "Pull me an IPA," she says. "I've got a surprise for you." 

“What sort of surprise?” Hux arches a brow, reaching down to crack open a Brooklyn East IPA. He slides it over to her and crosses his arms. 

"The kind you'll probably get really Irish over," she grins, downing half the bottle in one swig. Wiping her lips, she continues: "So my roommate that moved in last weekend. He's got an interview with Snoke tonight." 

Hux instinctively raises his upper lip. One week of living across from the fool has aged him more severely than fifty interactions with Matt the radiological technician could. If Hux hears  _ London Calling _ blasting after midnight one more time he will violently splinter, for that son of a bitch’s hearing has clearly gone after spending one too many hours fisting his dick to Joe Strummer’s garbling voice. 

“Is this where I resign?” Hux snaps at no one in particular. 

"What, and miss all the attention you get with those adorable freckles?" she says, and glances to her left where two young blondes are seated side by side, talking closely and giggling behind their cocktails as they eye Hux unashamedly with wide eyes. 

"He's a good guy," Phasma adds. "And besides, when you tell him what to do this time, he  _ has _ to listen." 

She smirks and takes another sip of her beer. 

“What in the absolute fuck is he interviewing for?” Hux sniffs, dodging the blondes’ attention. “I can’t be putting in orders for broken pints every other night.”

Phasma shrugs. "You'll have to ask Snoke. I ... "

Before she can finish her thought, there is a crash behind her, and both their eyes snap to a scene of an upended table and a chair clattering to the floor as two men lurch to their feet. Glassware tumbles to the floor and shatters, and one man grabs for the other, drunken threats loud over the music.

"Fuck me," Phasma growls, and downs the rest of her IPA before wading into the mess. Hux watches her bodily lift one man from his feet and wrap one hand around the other's bicep, and then she is hauling them both toward the door. Kicking it open with her steel toed boot, she shoves the two men out to deal with their disorderly business on the street. 

It is nearly a bowling match, for the form of Phasma’s roommate Ben, of whom they'd just been speaking, has chosen that moment to appear in the stairwell. He ducks out of the way with inches to spare, eyebrows lifted. One of the recent evacuees takes seeming issue with Phasma, for he rights himself after stumbling out and turns on her. Before Phasma can react, Ben stretches an arm out and holds a hand flat, palm up, between them. Like hitting a brick wall, the other halts, gaping at the man that towers over him, muscles taut beneath his t-shirt. Hux cannot see Ben's expression, but whatever it is stops the would-be offender, who then limps up the stairs and out of sight, throwing curse words over his shoulder that disappear into the din of the bar. 

Phasma and Ben exchange a few words, and Phasma disappears out the door in pursuit, likely to thoroughly eject the two hooligans from the property, leaving Ben to stand for a moment in seeming disorientation. Then his eyes lite on Hux, and he is crossing the room to slip into a seat across from him.

"Always like this in here?" he asks. He is wearing jeans, a green t-shirt that fits his toned form well, dog tags around his neck, but it otherwise nondescript, save for the scar still pink across the right side of his face.

Hux drinks in Ben’s frame, those broad shoulders pulled back into a slightly crooked posture. He’s brawn beneath the thin fabric of that offending t-shirt, and as the dog tags glint dimly in the low light Hux considers that this oversized pup must possess some shred of discipline somewhere, somehow.

Their eyes meet and his mouth grows wet.

“Always,” Hux swallows, clearing his throat. “Hence the need for more muscle.”

Ben's eyes meet his with unnerving expression, almost golden in the light from the advert signs glowing over the bar behind Hux. 

"Is that what I'm here for?" Ben asks, and there is a note like disappointment in his voice. 

“Well,” Hux arches a brow. “That’s my assumption. There are no bar positions open.”

Ben grunts, his face a mask of irritation and confusion both, as though the thought of being a bouncer is somehow distasteful to him. Or intimidating, for some reason. 

"You got a whiskey?" he asks. 

“On the rocks?” Hux sighs, uncrossing his arms.

“Straight. Double.” Ben’s eyes flicker up to Hux’s face at the sigh, forehead creasing. “If it’s not too much trouble.” 

“Nah,” he offers, grasping the bottle of Jameson he’d neglected to stow away. As he fixes the drink he avoid his neighbor’s gaze, finally raising his eyes when he pushes the amber swill toward Ben. “Twelve,” he says.

Ben extracts a wallet from his back pocket, and hands Hux a twenty, waving away the change. “Phasma didn’t tell me you worked here,” he comments, sipping from the warm scotch. It slides easily down his throat, burning in his belly and lending an instant flush to his cheeks. He rarely drinks; not with the cocktail of medications and painkillers he is on, but he wants an excuse to sit near this man for a moment. He is glad for the color lent by the alcohol as he recalls, easily, the way he has let himself substitute red hair, freckles, and that slender waist into the shadow fantasies that have brought him needed release over the last week. 

As Ben presses another crisp bill into his palm, Hux attempts to conjure a performance: bent elbows, forty-five degree angle of open desire, and a lidded stare. Though he remains stoic, for some reason unable to even muster a smile. “Thank you,” he manages, blinking, and breaks up the twenty at the register. When he places the tip into his bucket behind the bar, he begins to thaw, turning to Ben and leaning against the counter amiably. 

“Yes, about six months. Not exactly glamorous,” he nods, pitching a disinterested glance at Dopheld Mitaka mopping up sour vomit in the corner.

Ben glances at the dark haired man, little more than a boy, actually, whose put-upon expression as he mops up the filth is pitiable. He sweeps his gaze back to the lanky form leaning against the bar, and says without thinking:

"It's not all bad, at least." Then he takes another large swallow of whiskey, and adds hastily: "Right?"  _ Damn he's bad at flirting. _

Hux snorts. “Idealism. Cute.” 

Ben is stalling, nursing his drink, wanting a chance to talk to this hot-blooded creature for just a few more minutes, and, if he were being honest with himself, to delay this event he'd never imagined for himself: an interview, for any job other than what he was born to do. 

Swallowing another sip of bolstering whiskey, he traces the scar across his face, which is feels tingly, itches with the expanding capillaries of his cheeks. 

"So... Phasma tells me you go to school," he tries, for it is one of the several things he's wrung out of her over the last week about his mysterious neighbor. That, and that he wore striped pajama pants and a tight t-shirt that made his mouth water when Ben turned his music up too loud at night, on purpose, to bring the tousle-headed fireball pounding on the door, spitting mad and impossibly sexy. Ben had made sure to answer the door innocently enough in only boxers more than once.

“Unfortunately,” Hux mutters, watching as Ben trails a padded fingertip along the deep scar, smoothing along the ridges and bumps of puckered, pink flesh. It’s a poor habit for a poor bastard, and Hux considers telling him to stop.

He does not. 

Instead he wonders how he earned it, though his mind settles on a spread of distasteful scenarios: mosh pits, broken beer bottles, 4 am on the F train. He wrenches his eyes away to place the Jameson on a middle shelf and clear his throat.

Ben drops his hand from the scar when he notices Hux's green eyes tracking the movement, and idly grasps the dog tags at his chest, squeezing them once so hard that they bite into the flesh of his hand. It is a centering action, and one he finds himself repeating more and more often now that he has left the safety and structure of the military. He wears another pair under his shirt, those belonging to his grandfather, who died in service before Ben was born.

He releases the tags only seconds later, removing the hand to his glass, which rests now on the bar. Ben gazes into it, wanting to look up at Hux, but finding himself suddenly shy now that the man is actually speaking to him instead of having a hissing fit in his hallway at one in the morning.

He clears his throat as well, and asks: "So, what do you uh... go to school for?" Ben forces himself to look up, reminding himself that that is how a person has a conversation.  _ Was he always so bad at this? _

“Astrophysics. Theoretical. I’m a PhD candidate,” Hux divulges, straightening the collar of his crisp, black button-up. He turns to glance at Ben again, silently relieved that he’s stopped pawing at his face. It’s not  _ painful _ to stare at, surely, severe in some places yet soft in others, a sharp aquiline nose measured over crooked, plump lips. His features are bizarre, too bold, highlighted by the garish scar, though there’s a diffident note about him that glints just below the surface. 

“How old are you?” he asks, noting the shadows beneath Ben’s wide eyes

"I'll be twenty-three in July," Ben tells him, though he certainly feels much older. "You?"

“Twenty-seven at the end of the month.”

"Astrophysics," Ben murmurs. "That's... impressive. I used to..." 

Before he can finish telling Hux of his past, a phone rings behind the red head, piercing the lull of the bar with a shrill clatter so cacophonous that Ben jumps. 

Hux blinks impassively, unfazed at the jarring trill behind him. He promptly turns and picks up the bulky red handle of the rotary dial phone, scarcely glancing at Ben as he issues curt, sharp responses to the person on the other line. A brief moment passes before he sets the receiver down and straightens his shoulders. 

“That was Manager Snoke. Go through the swinging doors over there and take a left at the glass racks. Good luck,” Hux issues a single, cold nod.

Ben nods and leaves his drink at the bar, half finished. As an afterthought, he opens his wallet again, feeling those mesmerizing cat eyes on him as he fishes another twenty dollar bill out and lays it beside the glass. He does not glance up as he heads in the direction Hux indicated. 

 

A swinging door, grimed with greasy smudged fingerprints and months' long build up of grit, leads into a dusky orange-tiled kitchen with grout that is more black than white. A lone man stands before a fryer, white and black bandana wrapped around his head, jostling dubious looking french fries over grease that smells as though it hasn't been changed in months. The man has headphones in, and doesn't notice Ben. 

Turning the corner past the stacks of glasses, as Hux had instructed, Ben is faced with a narrow hallway, at the end of which is a single door with a tiny window inlaid with wire mesh. There is a splatter of something red across the bottom, as though a ketchup bottle had exploded nearby or someone had been hacked to death with an ax. 

Pausing, Ben almost,  _ almost _ , turns back, to take his chances with his trust fund or maybe even cave and ask his mother for work, but that thought alone drives him forward until he is putting out a hand to knock. 

Before fist can strike metal, however, the door is opened, and he is faced with a man whose very appearance startles Ben so much that only his military training keeps the expression of immediate distaste from his face. 

Snoke, for it must be he, is at least three inches taller than Ben, though his stoop makes him appear folded in upon himself, as does the ill-fitting yellow and blue Hawaiian shirt, sleeves hanging almost to his elbows. His face is pocked with acne scars, nose crooked and hooked, eyes sunken in an unhealthy grayish complexion. A nearly bald pate sports a few wisps of starch white hair, long and brushed back as though they might conceal the age spots. Long, spindly fingers grip the door frame with one hand, and beckon Ben inside with the other. 

Ben glances around the office as he enters. It is larger than he expected, with an ell shaped desk sporting a computer before a chair. All around the walls, monitors are mounted, showing scenes Ben recognizes: the bar, where Hux is grinning and chatting with two blonde women, the front door of the establishment, a view of the street and the alley before and behind the building. With a start, Ben notices the fourth floor landing, a camera angled perfectly to capture both Ben and Hux's doors. There are other monitors, but Snoke draws his attention away by pulling out a chair and motioning him into it.

Snoke waits for Ben to sit before slinking around to his own chair, lowering himself down with a hollow wheeze. He settles languidly, placing large palms along the arms.

“Hello Ben,” Snoke says, blinking at him with opaque, beady eyes.

Ben regards Snoke warily, as much because the man makes the fine hairs on the back of Ben’s neck stand on end as because he truly has no idea what he is here for. 

“Sir,” Ben says automatically, finding his own fingers laced to the end of the chair-arms, knuckles white. With a conscious effort, he relaxes, and moves his hands into his lap. 

“Relax, boy,” he instructs. “You will not be harmed here. I simply wanted to speak with you.”

Ben feels his face flush, and clears his throat, not caring for being called  _ boy _ . “Phasma said you might have work for me.” 

“It is not a term of ridicule,” Snoke elaborates, as though reading his mind. “But one of endearment. There are qualities about you that have gone unnoticed for too long. So much that has been beaten down, hidden away. I can see it in your eyes. How ungrateful this world is to you.” He raises a shaking, gangly finger to Ben’s dog tags. “I would like to begin by thanking you for your service.”

Ben's eyes narrow at the word  _ endearment _ as well, coming from this man. but his next words are like tiny slivers of glass being plucked from Ben's tender skin one by one: unnoticed, beaten down, hidden away. It was as though Snoke had kept a camera trained on Ben's throughout childhood, seeing every lonely winter while his father was deployed and his mother working, ever lonely summer with no friends playing pretend in the woods, imagining a different life for himself. And then there was military school, where his parents had, indeed, hidden him away because he did not measure up to their standards of behavior and success. 

When Snoke reaches out for him, and takes the dog tags around his neck, Ben flinches, but the man's next words are also entirely unexpected. Even in the hospital, recovering from his injuries, both physical and psychological, there had only ever been pity, disregard.

Never gratitude. Even his family never thought to suggest it.

"I..." Ben stammered, finding he did not know how to respond. Instant shame floods through him when his immediate reaction is to fight back the moisture in his eyes. He looks away, blinking, and coughs raggedly into one hand.

Composed again, he turns back, nodding, but cannot yet meet Snoke's eyes. "Thank you." His voice his barely a whisper.

“You don’t hear that much, do you?” Snoke rasps quietly. “And yet you bear the marks honor. This,” he reaches up to touch his own disfigured face, tracing a nonexistent scar, “this is fortitude. Bravery. How it must feel to see others recoil at the sight of you, when you have given everything for nothing.”

Ben shifts in his chair then, fingers automatically going to his face, remembering those green eyes looking at him with pity and... revulsion, perhaps... only moments before. It was a look he'd gotten more than once, that was true.

Then something struck him. "How... do you know it is from my service?"

“It brings you shame,” Snoke observes. “Why is that?”

Ben flushes harder. “It’s… nothing. People just don’t look at you… the same way.” 

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Ben says, swallowing, though he does know, thinking again of Rey’s gaze when she thinks Ben is not looking, or Hux’s open distaste at the bar. “Like you’re flawed. Like that’s all the see. The scar.” 

“Even your family?” Snoke asks, voice dripping with incredulity.

Ben shifts in his chair, uncomfortable at the thought of his parents. The phone calls he won’t return. The messages passed from Rey that he simply hears and ignores. The colossal disappointment he knows his father must feel in him, for having washed out so early, when he should have served his forty years.

“Yes,” he bit off. “Especially my family.” 

“That must be difficult for you. Though you don’t want my pity. You don’t need it. You already  _ know _ how strong you are, Ben.” 

Something he has not felt in a long while floods through his system, warm and encouraging.  _ Pride _ . He  _ had _ fought to live, and had fought for others, for his country. He had done everything without his parents’ support, on his own.  _ Yes _ , he  _ is _ strong.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, and this time his voice is not so tremulous. 

Snoke pats the dog tags with two fingers before leaning back into his twisted bearing. “It is clear to me that strength and bravery are primary qualities of yours. Where do your talents lie?”

“I… don’t know what would be useful here. Phasma said there was a regular band on the weekends. I play guitar. I suppose I can stop fights. Carry stuff.” He neglects to mention that he has doctor’s orders prohibiting the amount of weight he can lift, or that he cannot engage in strenuous physical activity until further notice. Ben shrugs, suddenly feeling both woefully overqualified and vastly unsuitable.

“You would be valued here at The First Order,” Snoke nods, as if reading his mind. “There are multiple positions to be filled; if you are interested in assuming a variety of responsibilities. This establishment is in dire need of a man such as yourself.”

“In dire need of a washed up soldier?” Ben laughs.

“Of a formidable veteran.” His lips curl into a smile. 

_ There is that feeling again _ .  _ Like finally receiving a cup of water after weeks alone in the desert.  _ All he knows is that he wants to be useful. Somehow. He has been stagnating for months, adrift on the sea now with no direction. He would be a fool to pass up an island within sight. 

He holds his hand out. “Thank you sir. Should I start tomorrow?” 

Snoke peers at him for a long moment, the air in the room suddenly stilling. “Not inquisitive,” he muses, clasping his hand. “Also an esteemed characteristic.” 

Ben furrows his brow, wondering whether he should blurt out:  _ “I didn’t ask because I don’t give a shit, _ ” but refrains.

“Tomorrow night, then,” Ben says, standing with Snoke’s hand still clasped in his. As he does, a spasm passes through his side, down his leg, from the low-seated chair, and he winces, squeezing Snoke’s hand hard in pain. 

“I will take excellent care of you,” Snoke puffs. Though he blinks when Ben crushes his hand, those beady eyes suddenly flicking up to his pained expression. Without a word he releases the blanched young man to slowly open a drawer. He extracts an orange bottle that rattles between his fingers and, without a word, begins to shake a white pill into the pit of a leathery palm. 

“This will help,” he states, presenting the gift. 

Ben glances at it, lifts a hand to pluck it from Snoke’s fingers, before thinking to ask: “What is it?”

“Something for the pain.”

Ben shrugs mentally, thinking that whatever it is, it could not be any worse than the cocktail of medications he was on for months in the hospital. Certainly the pills his doctor gave him for pain now, eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen twice a day, did little to nothing. He took the fat white pill from Snoke’s palm, and popped it into his mouth, chewing it. Making a face at the bitter taste, and nods.

“Thank you,” he says. 

Snoke nods. “Welcome to The First Order.”

 

* * *

 

Ben slips into the same seat he had occupied previously, and gazes at Hux, who is flirting casually with the two blonde women who are pink-cheeked with his attention. He is good enough at this game that Ben, who is usually an excellent judge of these things, cannot tell if women interest Hux or not. At last, the green eyed creature glances down at him, murmurs something to the girls, who giggle, and swaggers back to Ben. He must be acutely aware of how nice his ass looks in those pants. 

“Well?” Hux crosses his arms.

“Apparently I work here now,” Ben says, smiling languidly. 

Hux has to stop himself from wrinkling his nose as he gauges Ben’s relaxed grin. Yet without a word, he grabs an object from behind the bar and pushes forward the glass tumbler that still contains Ben’s unfinished drink. “Hm. You’ll no longer have to pay twelve for these then,” he grunts, meeting his gaze.

Ben blinks in surprise at the drink, unexpected, but takes a grateful sip. There is something nagging in the back of his mind about his recent experience, some voice that begs to be heard, but he ignores it. The alcohol helps, settling warmly in the pit of his belly.

“Thanks,” he says. “For saving it. Figured I might need it after … that?” 

“After what?” Hux blinks impassively.

Ben resists looking around for the camera he knows is trained on this spot, and suddenly wonders if there is a microphone as well. 

“Just… interviews are… nerve wracking,” he says lamely. He’d meant to say “  _ after that creepy as fuck experience.” _

Hux doesn’t respond. He has no interest in offering some banal statement of consolation, as if Ben’s newfound employment suddenly elevated the two of them to friendship. Instead, he blinks at his colleague, an acquaintance, and turns to take a waiting patron’s order.

Ben sighs as Hux turns away, and nurses his drink, watching him chat amiably with another man. Part of him wonders if he should bother, for certainly a man like this is out of his league, but Ben has always found himself most desirous of that which he could not have. He finally polishes off the whiskey, Hux ignoring him for the duration, and slides the glass to the edge of the bar.

Hux opens a tab for the man after a brief conversation and takes a moment to scan the bar counter for empty glasses and spills. He spots Ben’s empty tumbler and returns to him, plucking it up between nimble fingers. “Get you another?”

Ben offers him a genuine smile. “If you don’t mind, please.” 

As Hux turns to take down the bottle of Jameson again, Ben cannot help but allow his eyes to rake across those smooth, graceful lines, the way that ginger hair tapers softly above the back of his collar where the skin is dusted in freckles. He wonders where else they are, besides the backs of his fingers. By the time Hux sets his replenished drink before him, Ben is feeling warm, from both his imagination and, no doubt, the narcotic Snoke had given him. 

“Astrophysics, hmmm?” he muses. “You must be quite … brilliant for that field. What do you want to do?”

Hux notes the way a flush caresses Ben’s features, and how his honeyed tongue now caresses his ego. He offers a short laugh and leans against the bar. “I’m a theoretical physicist.”

Thus: contribute more bullshit to the ivory tower. Get paid to dick measure in the name of science and advancing humanity.

“I’ll toil away in a lab for the rest of my life working for the government that pays me the most.”

“Locked away in a lab for the rest of your life,” Ben echoes thoughtfully, allowing his eyes to flick subtly and appreciatively over Hux’s fine facial features. “That’s too bad.” He takes a long draught from his glass, definitely feeling the way his limbs feel pleasantly light, the everpresent pain in his side numbed. “Although to think I might be living across the hall from the next Oppenheimer....” 

“Tall. Thin. Chainsmoker. Self-destructive tendencies. Seems I fit the bill. Hello, my name is Robert,” Hux smirks.

“Will you become death, destroyer of worlds?” Ben gives him a small smile over the top of his glass, eyes glittering. He cannot help but be even more fascinated. “Speaking of chain smoking… can we smoke in here?” 

Hux gives him an easy grin. “If it comes to that.” Though he shakes his head at Ben’s second question and uncrosses his arms. “No. The city banned it years ago. They’re trying to extend the ban as well. The mayor is hell-bent, supposedly.” 

Ben sighs and rolls his eyes, though he would have never voiced in a hundred years that the hell-bent mayor was his own mother, Leia Organa. 

“Do you get a break? The ten minutes in the back alley kind?” Ben realizes he sounds slightly plaintive once the words are already past his lips, but his blood is hot and singing, and he doesn’t care. 

Hux slowly arches a brow. “And why would that be any of your business?”

Ben doesn’t register the tone, only the fact that he feels wonderful, and wants Hux’s attention all to himself. “Just thought a smoke would be nice, and as far as I’ve seen the current view outside is not that fantastic.” 

Hux’s lips tuck into a frown. “It’s not. And I don’t have a break until two.”

‘Haven’t you ever done something you’re not supposed to?” He grins. “It’s fun. Get Phasma to watch the bar for you. One smoke.”

Money laundering. Embezzlement. Flirting with lung cancer. Building up a liquor tolerance so that drivel such as this doesn’t spill out on drink number two.

“He watches us,” Hux warns him. “I can’t leave my post.”

Ben’s eyes almost glance up again, but he stops himself. With a small sigh, he shrugs. “Maybe I can come back down at two then,” he says softly, gazing openly at Hux, not bothering to hide his genuine attraction.

Hux beetles his brow, unsure whether or not he wants to slap the mawkish expression off Ben’s face or lick up the length of his scar. "Why?"

“Because I wanted to,” Ben says. “But if that doesn’t interest you, that’s fine.” 

“Jesus,” Hux shakes his head. “I’m not stopping you from stepping outside in freezing weather at two in the morning to indulge a habit you don’t even have. If you want to, by all means.”

“I do,” Ben says, smiling now, standing, as the bar is becoming busier, louder, and he is feeling more than a little woozy. 

  
“I’ll see you then.” 


	3. DisOrder

It is eight minutes until two am, and the first moment Hux has had to himself in hours. He bundles inside a scarf and coat, patting around for his pack of smokes with trembling fingers. His mouth is pooling with saliva, tongue itching for a drag as he tugs the door open and meets the blast of frigid winter air. Tears leak from his eyes, though he is far too grateful for a reprieve when the cigarette slips between his lips. His lighter flicks open, a flame sputters to life.

Hux takes only a single drag from his cigarette before the door behind him opens a crack, and Ben slips out, wearing a thick grey peacoat buttoned to his neck and a scarf that he has half disappeared in. He gazes at Hux and smiles.

“I caught you in time.”

Hux blinks at him as if he’s gone mad.

“You don’t even smoke.”

Ben tugs a pack of crushed Parliaments from his pocked and shakes one out. “Evidence that I do. When I feel like it. Got a light?”

Hux eyes him warily and holds up his silver lighter, flicking the wheel to conjure a flame between them.

Ben dips his taller frame down to let the tip hover over the flame and breathes life in the cigarette, then straightens and inhales as shallowly as he can, for Hux is correct. He doesn’t really smoke, not unless he’s extremely stressed. At the moment, however, he feels fuzzy and content, all cares blown from his mind by the deliciously lingering effects of opiates and booze.

“How’s work going?” he asks, for something to say.

“Standard. Engaging in futile attempts to restore order to an order-less cesspit,” Hux bites off, pulling hard from the cigarette.

Ben finds that he's allowing the silence to draw on a little too long after that comment, for he is leaning against the wall as the smoke coils up between them from his half forgotten cigarette. He's entranced by the way the cold brings a wonderful flush to the red-heads pale cheeks, and how the neon red _exit_ sign over the door at their backs makes his hair look like it is on fire.

“Do you get tired of all the people wanting to take you home at night?” he blurts out. “You seem to have plenty of admirers.”

Hux narrows his eyes and rakes a lingering gaze across the bundled mass that is his oafish, cloying neighbor. He’s steeped in dark shadows, and Hux nearly beckons him into the light.

He does not.

 _My patience is measured by the weight of their wallets_ , he inclines to say, though offers a shrug instead. “No.”

"So, if I asked you out, you wouldn't be irritated?" Ben finds a need for the smoke at this time, brings it to his lips for a long drag, suckling hard and feeling a flurry of nerves. Here he is, a combat veteran, undone by a pretty boy. He is pretty sure this is supposed to be done more subtly, or after more time has elapsed, but he is bereft of experience in such matters.

Hux nearly recoils from his words and balks. “Yes, I would be irritated,” he snipes, shooting him a look as if he’s pissed on his boots. “We’re coworkers now. Neighbors. Have some tact.” He jams the cigarette between his lips and rips from it, face suddenly hot, warmth leaking down his neck.

“Jesus,” he growls, vexed.

"Right," Ben mumbles, feeling his cheeks burning. "Sorry. I just thought..." He doesn't finish, and instead tosses the now depleted cigarette onto the ground and grinds it under his boot. He fishes another one out, and then stands there with it awkwardly, twirling it in his fingers and staring it, too embarrassed to ask for a light a second time.

Hux vibrates in place, fuming. His eyes are cast to the ground and he grips onto his own cigarette like a lifeline, finally glancing up when he feels like his skull is about to implode from the weighty silence that follows. Ben stands there so pitifully, so fucking haplessly, that Hux nearly slaps him for making him endure this moment.

“Here,” he snaps, wrenching the lighter from his coat. Hux stomps up to him and thrusts it into his giant palm.

How dare he. How dare he have the gall, what with his gauche, bilious behavior, and those large eyes and plush mouth and a chest that seems to engulf him from every which way, even now.

Startled by Hux's abrupt action, Ben finds himself fumbling to connect with the lighter this little spitfire is trying to thrust into his palm. It almost slips from both their grasps until Ben closes his fingers around Hux's, trapping it between their hands. For a moment, he cannot pull himself away, but those fierce green eyes do not invite invasion of space without permission, and so he carefully peels the lighter away. He cannot help but notice how delicate those fingers feel as he drags the tips of his own across them.

It is a split second that seems to last an eternity.

Hux’s breath catches in his throat, as Ben’s fingertips seem to sink into his bones. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d been, shivering beneath the large greatcoat that had once been his father’s. The frigid kiss of winter had latched on early this year, infecting him to the marrow that subsides, if only for a moment, when Ben’s furnace for a palm closes over his.

Ben lights his second cigarette, exhaling a small cloud of smoke from a lazy drag, and then finds himself shifting just slightly close enough to tuck the lighter back into the pocket of that greatcoat. He is afraid that if he touches him again, his hand would be tangled in that ginger hair, his lips on that mouth near blue in the chill.

He doesn't inch back, but looks down at him with raw want, for he cannot control his expressions, compromised by chemicals and lust and something more that he cannot name. Like something, someone, wants them together.

He does not voice that, cognizant enough to know it sounds mad, and instead says softly: "So you've never gone out with someone you shouldn't have? You're always appropriate?"

Hux’s lips part with a string of saliva and he attempts for a scowl. It’s more a stare than a glower, though, and his cheeks flush harder beneath the weight of Ben’s open expression. Hux wants to sew him shut, to snuff out those swimming eyes that are far too bright, and he blows a thin stream of smoke into his face.

“Always appropriate.”

Ben grins, still not moving back, but perhaps swaying a little closer, eyes flickering over Hux’s lips even as he squints into the smoke.

“Bullshit.”

Hux’s mouth curls wickedly. “You don’t know me.”

“I want to,” Ben purrs softly.

Hux carves a path down Ben’s face with laser green eyes. “You’ll live,” he sniffs.

Ben takes the opportunity to more closely assess Hux's features, with his delicate eyelashes and the freckles blending into pink cheeks, the tiny bit of exposed neck beneath the color of his jacket.

"I might not," he murmurs, biting his bottom lip as his eyes flick back to Hux's.

“How dramatic,” Hux mumbles, feeling heat creep down to his chest. Ben’s naked lust burns through him, and he suddenly has to tear away from the man’s open-flamed intensity.

"I set an alarm just to come stand in the cold with you. That's at least a little flattering?" He says it softly, like the suggestion might provoke defensiveness.

Hux grinds his teeth, suddenly too warm, too exposed out here in the middle of the night. “It’s --” he huffs, suckling on the last dregs of his cigarette, “Fine. Okay? Just -– fuck, fine.”

Ben feels a warm thrill down his spine, tingling warmth in his cheeks that drives away the frigid cold. He's never asked anyone out before. Couldn't, in military school, couldn't in the army, and that had been his whole life thus far. He is pretty sure he mangled it, and would never have tried but for chemical courage, and he is as thrilled as a teenager asking someone to the prom even for this snarly, curse laden agreement. He tamps down replies that sound more like Rey, such as:

_Oh my god, really? Are you serious? That is so awesome!_

Instead, he tries to fight his burgeoning grin and suggests something easy, something everyone does, something safe, because he has a feeling he would not be safe going out for drinks with this one.

"Dinner?"

Hux snaps his eyes up to Ben’s, piercing him with guarded accusation. “I don’t have time for sit down dinners,” he swallows, throwing his cigarette butt onto the ground.

“What do you have time for?”

“A quick bite. Up on campus, maybe. I don’t know,” Hux says.

Why the hell is he suddenly making suggestions?

Ben is nodding, however, eager for whatever Hux will offer. "That sounds good. When?"

“Wednesday. Six, sharp. I trust you know how to make your way up to Columbia,” Hux instructs. He stuffs his hands in his coat and takes a measured step away from Ben.

“I know my way around the City,” Ben assures him, resisting the urge to reach out and bunch his fists in that coat and pull him back for a kiss. “Should we… exchange numbers? So I can text you when I get there?”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Give me your phone.”

Ben tugs it out and hands it to him, hoping he goes straight for the address book.

“I -– need your thumbprint. Or your passcode,” he sighs, brow twisted.

Ben shifts to Hux's side, turning around so they are shoulder to shoulder rather than taking back the phone. He reaches down and swipes his thumbprint over the screen, and it clicks open.

Hux stiffens at the proximity and, with stiffened shoulders, taps the phone app and plugs in his number. He offers the phone back to Ben, the contact yet unsaved, and offers a single nod.

Ben hits save, and then begins to suggest that Hux might want his number, but decides he's pushed his limits far enough.

"Thank you," he says instead, giving Hux a lopsided smile. "I'm... looking forward to it."

Hux gazes at him for a brief moment before nodding. Twice this time. “Get some rest.”

Ben smiles, realizing yet again that he wants to cup that fine jaw and kiss him. Instead, he takes the fire escape stairs back to his apartment, giddy with excitement and exhaustion both.

 

* * *

 

The following evening, Hux reports in early for his shift, opening The Order (or rather _DisOrder_ , as their Yelp reviews and Instagram hashtags seem to have decreed) as a dim, wintry sun begins to sink below the horizon. He disappears into the maw that is his personal prison and shivers off his layers, tucking them away into a backroom laced with the lingering scent of piss. It is a Saturday, his prime night for siphoning tips from loose fingers and looser mouths, even having gone so far on some nights to scale the bar and pry a patron’s jaw open for a waterfall of gut-curling liquor.

He swipes at his eyes, navigating through a maze of graffiti as he flicks on hazy lighting on his way to the bar. Fighting the urge to funnel down two fingers from the virginal Glenlivet bottle, he tasks himself with orderly undertakings in an attempt to quiet his mind. Irritation flares inside him when he drinks in the Jameson bottle, and he squeezes his eyes shut, cringing when Ben Solo suddenly infects his thoughts.

He’d been stood up.

Stood the fuck up, at the behest of _his_ own suggestion to partake in some baseless social norm that two humans share a meal and a drink, and he groans audibly, for he is utterly, indisputably alone.

Hux shoots for the Glenlivet, scraping at an eyebrow in nervous habit when he hears the door thump open.

* * *

 

Ben opens the door to The First Order, and sees Hux standing behind it and his chest clenches. The red light makes his freckles stand out, and the bridge of his nose is sharp and perfect, his posture graceful.

God, the man is beautiful.

As though sensing such scrutiny, Hux glances up, meets Ben’s eyes, and looks away with clear purpose. The line of his mouth creases flat and he sniffs, rebuffing the hopeful gaze and subsequent greeting that spills from his neighbor’s own quivering lips. Imperceptibly, Hux also trembles, though not with hope, but bridled umbrage.

“Clock in with Snoke. You don’t report to me,” Hux sniffs, a small flame of victory burning dull in his chest when he observes Ben wilt across the counter.

So much for something working out in his favor. The first man he'd ever actually _asked out_ had said yes, and Ben had blown it. He couldn't even decide if it was his own fault or not.

Ben feels like shit, in all its variations. His face hurts where he’d taken a fist to his jaw, and if he hadn’t had worse injuries, he’d suspect it was broken. Either way, he could feel the way the skin stretched taut and cracked over the swelling. Before coming downstairs to The First Order, he had stared into his bathroom mirror at the ugly yellow-purple bruise, brushed fingers tenderly over it, and felt such a montage of emotions that it was hard to see which floated to the top of the morass he is caught in.

First, there is the fact that he is not stupid, and realizes what values Snoke sees in him: brawn, capacity for maximum violence, fearlessness, and fucking pathetic gullibility. He should have known that Snoke did not hire him for his talents on stage, or for any need of him to back up either Hux or Phasma, both perfectly capable without him.

Hux.

Ben had texted him with apologies, explanations such as he could without incriminating himself, pleas for the man to respond, and all to no avail. The fact that Ben had missed that, apparently, one chance he had to perhaps win the interest of the first spark of flame he’d felt in years, is even more maddening than the fact that he has stooped to some level beyond his character.

Now, it seems, there may be no way out of either situation.

Ben is now formulating more apologies, bordering on begging in tone as the door closes behind him, when suddenly Aaron, one of his new bandmates, latches onto an arm.

“Yo, dude,” he hisses into Ben’s ear. “I’ve got some killer blow, come on.”

Ben opens his mouth to refuse, but then a wave of anger and shame pushes down on his chest, and stifles his refusal.

“Sounds good,” he mumbles, not meaning it. It just sounds better than thinking about what he’d done the night before, and about Hux’s icy stare.

He follows Aaron to the back, believing they are heading to the staff restroom, when he finds himself suddenly following his Knight of Ren toward Snoke’s office. Ben’s first idea is that this is some trap, that there will be cops on the other side of that door waiting to take Ben into custody for his complicity, with Snoke spewing denial of his involvement, but Snoke himself opens the door.

The man’s smile is eerie, though what Ben imagines passes for sincerity on his craggy, paste-white face.

“Gentlemen,” Snoke wheezes, beckoning with a quivering finger, “come in.”

Ben peers past Snoke into the office, more than dubious, and might have felt nervous if he hadn't taken a xanax before coming downstairs. Again, he eyes the video feed above Snoke's desk, where one screen pictures the back alley where the night before he had shared a cigarette with Hux. Now Ben wonders if Snoke had perched here like a sinister vulture and watched the whole scene unfold between the two: the shared smoke, the way Hux had been close enough to kiss, the exchange of numbers. The thought makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His eyes flick to the screen that shows Hux smiling as he wipes down the bar, chatting to a dark haired boy, and his cheeks threaten to color, so he rests his gaze on Snoke. The man is once again clad in a Hawaiian shirt and white pants, like some bad imitation of nineteen-eighties Miami. He shuffles into the office, careful not to make contact with any point or angle of his new boss, and wedges himself into a corner as Aaron crowds in behind.

Snoke turns to rummage through his desk, shoulders sagging as he parses through rattling pill bottles.

“You performed well last night, Ben,” he coughs, plucking up a bag filled with white powder.

The drawer slams, shunting the desk forward an inch. With a shaking palm, he unfurls the eight ball and proffers it alongside a blunt razor blade. “This is your reward,” he intones, extending both hands to connect with this oversized neophyte.

Ben hesitates, the concept of plucking the drugs from Snoke's palm clashing with his sense of propriety with a sound like ringing bells, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Aaron stretch out a hand to assist him in his indecision. Snoke's beady, black eyes capture him in a raptor-like stare, however, and Ben's bandmate and recent partner in... something _resembling_ crime... withdraws quickly, leaving Snoke proffering Ben his "reward." It feels like a test, and for a split second, Ben considers purposefully failing, but no good reason dawns on him. The opposite actually. It's easier to talk to people high, like angry redheaded bartenders one had stood up the night before.

He takes the plastic bag, and the razor blade, and starts to shove it in his pocket.

"Um... thanks," he mumbles.

“No,” Snoke’s voice sharpens. “Do it here, where it’s safe.” He taps an overgrown fingernail against the polished veneer of the desk, issuing a demanding stare between two of his hounds. His eyes still upon the dark purple bruising that hemorrhages down Ben’s chin, and he hums, rapping against the wood with slow clacks of his nails.

Ben narrows his eyes at Snoke, then glances at the camera displays on the screens, and again wonders if somehow he is being tricked. Perhaps there is a video recorded in this room as well. No doubt there is, and here is Ben Organa-Solo, son of the mayor of New York City, in a seedy bar reduced to snorting drugs off a plastic desk top under the watchful eye of someone he suspects his mother would wholly disapprove of.

With that thought, he tugs the plastic bag and the razor back out of his pants pocket, and unties it. Dumping a liberal amount onto the smooth surface of Snoke's work space, he begins to card through it with the razor blade, cracking chunks apart and assembling the fine, glittering dust into several long lines. Then he glances about for something to roll up, knowing there is no money in his wallet.

Snoke fishes for his wallet and plucks out a crisp bill, presenting it to Ben with an unwavering stare.

Ben notices the pursed smile of Benjamin Franklin staring up at him with an air of disapproval, and promptly rolls the bill in on itself. With one last flick of his eyes to the looming Snoke, he leans down and inhales one of the lines. He straightens, holding the hundred dollar tube out to Aaron, who takes it with enthusiasm and nudges Ben out of his way. It puts him uncomfortably close to Snoke, who makes no effort to step aside.

“Ice your wounds,” Snoke demands, raising a wrinkled finger to Ben’s chin. He doesn’t quite connect with the bruised flesh, instead inching forward with minute shuffles of his feet.

Ben leans away from the finger, and his brows bunch, and he is about to say something in objection to Snoke's uncomfortable closeness, or at least lurch to the other side of the office, but suddenly a rush of euphoria has him rooted to the spot, blinking, lips open, pupils blown wide. He sucks in a tiny breath of air, lungs constricting and heart pounding as it pumps bliss through his bloodstream.

"Ohhh," he sighs, a hand reaching up to graze the bruise purpling his chin where it had connected with a meaty fist the night before.

"It's fine," he says. That's right. Everything is totally fine. Snoke. His new job. Hux will even be fine too. He just has to go out and explain things and all will be well.

Snoke finally cracks a smile and reaches over to pat Ben’s elbow. “Have another,” he insists, pitching a glare over at Aaron, who snaps up with a hoot.

“Good shit,” the blond sniffs, swiping at his nose. He nudges Ben playfully and jitters in place, keyed up with fizzing energy. “Yeah, do it.”

Ben doesn't need to be told twice, and in a matter of seconds, another line has disappeared up the other nostril. He straightens, pinching the bridge against the tickling sensation, then collects a liberal coating of powder on his finger and rubs it over his gums, which instantly go numb.

"Damn good shit," he says, absently shoving the hundred dollar bill in his pocket.

There was something he'd wanted to ask Snoke, to complain about how the night before had involved violence and things in the shadows, but at the moment he can't cling to the thoughts. One thing does break through.

"I need to talk to Hux," he says cheerfully, almost laughing, and pointing at the door.

“Give him my regards,” Snoke’s smile grows wider, teeth glinting just below the surface.

Ben nods fiercely, and grabs the door handle, then remembers the coke, and turns around to grab it, tying it sloppily, and shoves it into his pocket on top of the rolled bill. Then he shoves himself out the door toward certain forgiveness.

Meanwhile, Hux chews the inside of his cheek as the dark-haired dolt across from him siphons out the last dregs of his patience. He considers cutting the man off, though his exponential consumption of three watered down gin and tonics has paradoxically made this creature duller.

“You’ve a tab running, yes?” Hux cuts through the man’s garbling sentence, though before the patron can re-hinge his jaw, a lumbering mass plops down beside him.

Hux blinks, stilling when Ben Solo leans forward, face splitting in half with a grin. He steps back, dually affronted by Ben’s stained Metallica shirt and that mawkish, open stare. It is a combination that would normally warrant an eye roll, though it now earns him a searing glare.

Hux had waited an excess of sixteen minutes the night before, sitting in a dive between 113th and Broadway, before he had ripped out of his seat in a flood of chagrin. Now cloaking lingering humiliation in a torrent of resentment, Hux turns his back to Ben and busies his hands with the clinks of glasses. He fights the instinct to ask just where the hell he got that bruise blooming across his jaw, and instead pours a deluge of ire into stocking and shelving the bar. Yet Hux, unable to quash his bitter thoughts amidst this attempt at order, dimly recalls the desire to lick up the length of Ben’s clownish features. He flushes and mentally flagellates himself for such weakness, nearly dropping a glass in the process.

Ben cannot help but admire the shape he's presented with as Hux turns away from him, noticing the swell of the man's ass rather than the tense shoulders, the narrow waist instead of the clenched jaw. Sailing forward on a tide of poor judgment, he crosses into forbidden territory, behind Hux's well-polished bar, and onto the soft floor mats shrouding the stone. He pauses within a few inches of his prey, brushing fingers in a light grip on Hux's elbow.

"Hey. Talk to you a sec?" His voice comes out in a rush, sounding more like a secret plea than a simple inquiry.

Hux whirls around, eyes blown wide in disbelief. “I’m _working_ ,” he hisses, ripping his arm away.

Ben's eyes track the glass in Hux's long fingers, and he reaches out and takes it from him, tugging away his dishtowel as well.

"I'll help. Just... listen for a sec? Last night, wasn't my fault. Snoke... he called me and said I had to go help a couple of the guys in the band get some stuff that belonged to the bar..."

He is chattering away at a thousand words a minute, ignorant of the gravity of Hux's incredulous and indignant stare as he swipes another glass from the sink and starts drying it without rinsing, resulting in a garish film of soap.

Hux snatches the glass back and considers cracking it over his thick skull, if only to end this maudlin soliloquy. “Ben,” he barks, cutting him off and earning glances from several patrons. “Fuck off. Do your job, I don’t need this right now.”

Ben blinks at him as he snaps, but is still chemically undeterred. One hand again goes out to graze fingers over Hux's arm, and he steps closer, head bent in confidence that is nevertheless on display to the Hux's patrons, especially the one merely inches away across the counter.

"Don't be mad, please?" he implores. "I swear I'll make it up to you. I'll help you close tonight. We can get out of here early... go get pizza?"

Hux’s face burns, drilling down his spine in twin pillars of humiliation. He bares his teeth, ready to snap forward and sink into pliant flesh if Ben attempts another inch.

“What the hell are you on?” Hux hisses, glaring into glassy, dark eyes.

Anger bubbles inside his veins, rising up to stain his cheeks crimson as he feels sets of eyes lingering upon the foot of space burning between them. Keenly aware that this appears to be some type of lovers’ spat, he physically recoils at the thought and steps backward.

“Let.  _Go_.”

Ben drops his hand, confusion and realization finally managing to sink through his euphoric haze.

"Hux, I'm sorry," he gulps, suddenly feeling as though his feet aren't quite touching the floor. He gropes for a bottle of whiskey, picks up a glass, thinking that it will settle him.

Hux gapes at him for a moment, finally breaking from the onset of shock when he whiffs the sharpness of the bourbon.

“I'm calling Snoke.”

Ben's eyes narrow at the absurdity of that comment, and he almost laughs, except the concept of actually being threatened like a child raises his ire.

"And what the fuck do you think he cares?" he snaps loudly, pouring an easy three fingers of liquor into his tumbler and giving Hux a half-glare as he takes a healthy swig.

Hux takes a step forward, suddenly shedding any and all chagrin. “I’ll have you fired for such unprofessionalism. You’re a mockery to this establishment,” he growls, nearly raising a finger to jab Ben’s chest.

Now Ben does glare, any conciliatory leanings he'd had dampened and smashed along with his attraction to this creature. Hux suddenly became a vision of spite rather than beauty, with narrow green eyes that burn instead of sparkle, lips bearing a hiss rather than a softness he wanted to taste.

The liquor is acrid in his empty belly, burning along his throat, and for the first time he truly notices the other patrons at the bar, and the way Hux has invited them all to not only stare at him, but partake of his embarrassment as he is called a "mockery."

"You couldn't get me fired if you wanted to," he issues in challenge, though his voice comes out angry and small.

“Yes I could,” Hux sneers, the corner of his mouth curling up in a derisive smile. “Do  _not_ test me.”

Ben thinks of firing off the list of reasons why Snoke wouldn't sack him: the glowing words of praise the night he'd given Ben a job, the task entrusted to him the night before, the way Snoke wanted to reward him and cared for his pain. A shaking hand instead drowns those words in another drink of whiskey, and his stomach curls. Unshakable confidence only covered the surface of Ben Solo.

Draining the glass, he sets it heavily on the counter. Only he misses it, and it topples into the floor and shatters.

"Fuck," he grumbles, starting to lean down to pick up the pieces with bare hands.

Hux balks and suddenly twists a hand in Ben’s shirt, tugging him up by the nape. “Get up,” he hisses. “Just go. Fucking go. I’ll deal with this.”

Ben's center of gravity is disrupted by the sudden lurching motion as Hux, stronger than he looks, jerks him up from the floor like a naughty child. It's instinct, honed by war, that has Ben's hand an inch from closing fingers over that delicate wrist and bending it back, but it's a drug induced haze that dulls that impulse long enough for thoughts to get through. Instead, he transforms the motion into an ill tempered swipe, ridding himself of the grip, and takes a step back.

"Fine," he growls. "Fuck you." He doesn't care who hears. With that, he turns unsteadily, grabs the bar for purchase, and retreats to the stage, trying to ignore his burning face.

Hux spills a caustic string of vitriol beneath his breath as he watches this abomination of a man stomp off. He too begins to clomp around in the wake of the tornado that is Ben Solo, glass crunching beneath his boots with his face aflame.

“Hux, are you -–“

“ _Clean this up!_ ” he snaps at an approaching Mitaka, and sobers with a shred of guilt when the poor sod spasms in fear.

“No, I’m sorry, just -– go, fucking, just. Can you just fetch me a broom?” Hux amends, crouching down to dirty his hands.

Hux is still sweeping up the detritus left in Ben's wake as amps purr to life, Aaron clatters a warm-up trill across his snare drum, and Ben, Kylo Ren now that he is on stage with his Knights, stoops to plug in his guitar.

The band was here before Ren became the frontman, and it remains a mystery what happened to his predecessor. None of the other Knights seem to think overly much on, perhaps due to a steady supply of inspirational substances like the depleted eight ball in Ren's pocket, and Vicodin rattled out of a bottle into open palms. Snoke had them all hooked, and perhaps, Ren thought, he was on his way there.

He couldn't give a fuck right now, however, because this too is part of his job. Entertaining this burgeoning crowd that drifts in around this time every Thursday and Saturday night. Snoke had convinced him easily that they would come to hear Ren's particular version of music, his blend of seventies and dirty couch-hopping rage punk. It is like everything that Snoke says: honey to his ears. Unlike that bitter, unforgiving shit haunting the bar.

Playing music was usually a balm to his soul, but not this night. He can not even look out over the crowd, enjoy their faces as the fledgling band worked through their first show together, playing classics they all knew by heart. His eyes kept flicking to Hux, and hearing his words.

Telling him to fuck off. Calling him a mockery.

Belting out Clash lyrics, the feedback whining in his ears and the noise of the crowd over the music makes his blood boil. He'd been called enough names in his life, ridiculed and teased for everything from his big ears to the fact that his parents always missed his fucking events at school until he stopped giving a shit about what he did or did not need on his goddamned college resume.

Fuck it. Fuck his parents, fuck getting slugged in the face by some stranger he'd had to leave on the floor of a ratty restaurant in East Harlem, fuck this shit job, and especially, _especially_ , fuck Breandán Hux.

They are not three songs into their set when Ren's clouded mind and numb fingers stumble over the chords to _White Riot_ , and someone has the fucking gall to crow at him from the crowd. He picks the man's face out, lips puckered over a beer bottle, and for one second, the guitar almost leaves his hands and sails through the air to smash into the smug asshole's face. At the last second, however, chords screeching and notes dying beneath a cacophony of stuttering drums and shouts from his bandmates, Ren slams the guitar to the side, and it collides with an amplifier, and comes to a glorious fucking end.

He leaves it there, not caring that he steps on the bridge, or that Aaron is calling his name, or that the crowd is actually both obviously pleased and pissed at this development, erupting in a wave of insults and cheering and laughter alike. This is the music that fills his ears as he stalks across the bar, rams his shoulder into the kitchen door, and disappears.

Hux stares at the aftermath of Ben’s frenzied fit, suddenly distraught and mortified that he was once ever civil to such a rabid creature. His ears ring with hollers and chants as the bar quickly descends into a roar of chaos. A mosh pit forms in the wake; the amplifier screeching and crackling with sparks of electricity before Aaron rips the cord out from Ben’s destroyed guitar. The sounds of glass shattering and the garbled remnants of _White Riot_ drown out his coworkers’ attempts at order, and Hux quickly strides over to the red telephone to punch in the three digits that he has become all too familiar with.

Yet before he can, he glances up at a piercing shout, only to discover a man waving a badge.

“ _Undercover NYPD! Calm! Down!_ ” a man bellows, plainclothed, and Hux recognizes him from move-in day: the recipient of Poe’s jacket and subsequent affections. 

“Congratulations, Snoke,” Hux mutters, punching in for his manager’s line as disorder rages around him. “I hope Ben Solo was worth it.”


	4. Saccharine Debacle

Phasma answers the door in running tights and a tank top, pulling it open for Hux without much in the way of a greeting beyond a muted sound of acknowledgement.

“Hello,” Hux offers half a smile.

“Hey,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

The apartment is cleaner than Hux suspected it would; for some reason he has associated Ben with chaos and lack of self respect: perhaps because of the drugs, the cacophonous punk rock, or the raging temper. Nevertheless, everything here is in order: a long couch along the wall beside the door, facing a large flatscreen TV. Two guitars are on pedestals on either side of the television, and a modern art print above it, splashed with reds and blacks and moving with color and feeling that Hux instantly loves, though he does not recognize the artist. A shaggy black rug adorns the hardwood floor, a small round dining table with three mismatched chairs in the corner. There is no dust, nothing out of place. It must be Phasma’s doing, for Hux knows her to be disciplined. Always up at five am for a run, always on time for work despite having a day job as a personal trainer. She had been military, Hux remembers.

Phasma leads him to a red couch, framed by a window onto the city, and motions for him to sit. Hux notices books laid out on the table which look like photo albums or scrapbooks, and a box about the same size.

She settles onto the couch, back to the arm, legs folded beneath her, and waits for Hux to sit. When he does, she crosses her arms.

“I can’t deal with seeing Ben like this,” she says. “I need your help.”

Hux tenses at the sound of that wretched name.

“Like what?” he snaps, suddenly aware that he has been cornered.

"He's a mess. This shit with Snoke is no good for him. I didn't know what he'd be having him do. I still really don't know because he won't tell me. But I do know he's really upset about you. He likes you. A lot."

“Then tell him to quit if he can’t follow through on Snoke’s orders,” Hux hisses, ignoring her second statement. His face is warm, trickling down his limbs with an itching need to flee.

"If he thought there was anything else he could do, he probably would quit. What the fuck are you really mad about? That he didn't meet you for dinner? It wasn't his fault. Which you would know if you'd listened to him for one fucking second."

“Isn’t he a veteran? Can’t get some pensioned job? I don’t have time for this, Phasma. I don’t have time to date. I’m not interested in your friend,” Hux fires off. He can’t look at her, reddened and sinking down into his seat as he suddenly feels flayed by this impromptu inquisition; too vulnerable, too exposed.

Phasma sighs and pulls one of the books up from the table and holds it against her chest.

"I'm not trying to play matchmaker, but you're full of shit if you say you're not interested. I just want you to quit being queen fucking bitch to him like you're too damn good for him, because let me tell you. You're not."

Hux starts to laugh, half-manic and catching in his throat as he begins to stand. “Great. Fucking great. Are we fucking –- just, can you just. Are we fucking done here?” he pitches, voice almost crackling.

"Quit being such a self-centered cock-sucking shit, Breandán," Phasma snaps. "Have some goddamned compassion for a minute and listen to me. Sit the hell down.”

“That’s what I fucking _am_ ,” he snarls, folding his arms violently. “I can’t stop fucking being that because that’s what I am, and if your cloying friend is interested in _me_ then he… he -–“ Hux begins to gulp down harsh breaths, suddenly lowering himself back down to steady his breathing.

"After years in the military you learn to judge character, Bren. Especially as a captain," Phasma says, her voice pitched lower now, calmer. "You're a good guy, but you push everyone away. I don't know what happened in your past, but you should know what happened in Ben's. Maybe then you won't be as quick to judge him right now."

 _I am not good_ , he wants to screech.

Hux suckles down air, gripping onto his arms, as he attempts to pull it together. Breathe. Listen. Panic later, and listen. He nods, permitting her to continue. His face is on fire.

Phasma sighs, and stands to walk briefly to the kitchen, coming back with a bottle of chilled water. She hands it to Hux, and then waits for him to take a sip before she scoots closer to him on the couch, so she can open the book on her lap.

It is indeed, a photo album, and in it Hux notices mostly pictures of Phasma and other men and women he doesn't recognize, but finally she flips to page and jabs a finger at a photograph. In it, she is beside Ben, who is shirtless, in desert army fatigues, dog tags on a bare, sun-bronzed chest, white smile as broad as his face. Their arms are looped, and in the background is a black helicopter.

"This is Ben Solo," she says, and then drags her finger over to the helicopter. "This was his bird."

Hux’s face grows even hotter and he glugs a swig of water. His eyes map out Ben’s broad chest, his skin a lovely olive tone in the desert heat, and Hux makes a peculiar coughing sound.

Phasma chuckles softly. "Ben was always a big dork. Look." She traces a few small letters, barely visible, painted in grey along the underside of the machine's nose. Hux squints closer, and sees it reads _Tie-Fighter_.

“Oh.

Phasma turns a page, showing Hux an assortment of photos of she and Ben in the Middle East: pictures of them being silly in camp, playing ball, at the mess table, playing poker. A photo of Ben lifted in Phasma's arms and clinging to her neck while her head is thrown back in laughter, the corpse of a giant camel spider laying in front of them and a look of mock terror on Ben's face. His unscarred face.

"This was his family. Packed off to military school when he was ten, never good enough for his folks. These were the people that loved him, and he is just as alone as you now. He's lost. So yeah, he'll do whatever Snoke tells him to do. And Snoke wants him to himself."

He stares at Ben’s face, impossibly youthful in these captured moments, and he dimly recalls wanting to lick his scar that first night only five floors below.

“Phasma, I don’t need his sob story,” Hux finally mumbles. He shifts, pausing to linger on thoughts about the lonely, lovely Ben Solo. Did he give locals cigarettes the way he offers them to Hux? Or possibly water, passed off to a small child. Hux takes a sip of his and dismisses another question: is his mouth as plush as it looks?

Phasma is watching him, and gradually relinquishes turning pages, and letting Hux do it, until the album is finished. She takes it gently from his lap, and lays it on the table. She doesn't pick up another just yet.

"About three months after the picture with that spider, Ben's chopper was shot down in enemy territory. He pulled two wounded soldiers he was transporting and his copilot to safety in an abandoned house, and defended them for two hours until help arrived. All the while with his t-shirt tied over half his face, three busted ribs, and a piece of shrapnel in his side."

She gestures at the other albums. "I have pictures of that too, if you want to see. Of when then they brought him back to base."

Hux begins to pick at an eyebrow, scraping short nails toward the apex of its arch. “I… No. That’s alright,” he mutters, though his imagination bristles with images of twisted metal, smoke, and death.

"That's where he got the scar on his face. Not some bar brawl, or whatever you imagined. That's why he limps. This was his dream, and he lost it. He won't tell anyone because he doesn't want anyone feeling sorry for him, but I just wanted you to see. Why Snoke got his claws in. Why he's hurting. Give him a break."

She pauses, then gestures at the box on the table. "That is a box full of medals. One of them is a silver star his parents didn't even attend the ceremony for. He's just as lonely as you. And a good man."

Hux coughs into the crook of his elbow and shuts his eyes.

“I’ll give him a break, Phasma. But if he’s as good and noble as you claim him to be, we should just...” His voice sounds hollow, and he attempts to wash it down with water.

“Give yourself a break too, Bren.”

Hux rubs at the corner of his eye and swallows thickly.

“Right.”

* * *

Hux shuffles toward the door, compelled from his warm bed by an insistent knocking that wouldn’t go away despite squeezing his eyes shut and pulling the blanket over his head. He is scowling as he snatches the handle and wrenches it open, obscenities perched on his lips.

Standing in the hall, as unexpected as some apparition, is Ben. Or Kylo Ren… whoever the hell he is. He's looking different in several ways this morning: paler, with dark smudges under his eyes, his long, irritatingly luxurious partially pulled up in a messy bun so that it falls across his cheeks and barely hides the ugly bruise on one arch. He has on plaid plants for sleeping, and a green shirt one size too small (or just right?) that clings in such a way that is shows off every muscle in his torso, and accentuates his arms. Hux immediately notices the fact that one of these arms is both covered with an elaborate full sleeve tattoo he can not begin to decipher with one glance, and also culminates in a hand with knuckles scraped raw. That hand is clutching a bag, and the other is poised at his chest with two overlarge mugs from which steam is rising.

"Hi," Ben says, voice slightly hoarse. His expression is a mixture of sheepishness and hope.

Hux's mouth parts by centimeters at the absurd sight before him, initially awash in shock that is quickly followed by irritation. He glances at his wrist for the time and swipes at an eye.  
  
"What the hell do you want?" he garbles up at his neighbor.  
  
Asleep for four hours, and this is what he's rewarded with.

"I wanted to... make up for missing dinner. So I brought you breakfast. And coffee." Ben's cheeks flush slightly as he takes in Hux's glowering countenance, and one bare foot shifts back, like he is preparing to flee.

Hux raises his upper lip to hurl a quip, though his nose betrays him. He whiffs the rich scent of bacon and swallows, suddenly aware that he hasn't eaten in an age.  
  
"What is it?" he demands, glaring down at the bag in his large hands.

"Umm.. a little of everything. I didn't know... what you like, so I made... a bunch of stuff. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, muffins..." He glances back to Hux, brow knitted in preparation to be told off yet again.

Hux snatches the bag from his hands and pokes his nose inside. His overly sentimental neighbor had not been bluffing, and Hux glances up at him warily.  
  
"You made all this?" he tests.

"Yeah. I like to cook. And it's still hot." He offers a shy smile, still clutching the coffee cups to his chest. He uses his now free hand to pluck one from his fingers and offers it to Hux.

"You don't know how I take my coffee," Hux sniffs, though he accepts the cup with curled fingers.

"Well I can go back to my apartment and fix it if you don’t have cream. But I just guessed."

“No dairy. Black is fine,” Hux mutters.

He suddenly stares down at the objects in his hands and then back up at Ben, unsure where to settle his eyes.

“I… Thank you,” he manages belatedly, ears warming.

Ben's flush deepens, turning his pale cheeks ruddy.

"I made enough for us both, but I don't have to stay… if you don't want me to."                         

Hux matches his complexion and staggers back from the door. After a paralytic pause, he nudges it open further with a toe, and immediately turns to dip back into the studio. He makes his way over to the small kitchen table, shoving aside textbooks thicker than his neighbor’s skull, and stops himself from checking if the lumbering mass has followed.

Four hours of sleep. Who in the fuck does this to someone running off four hours of sleep, zero calories, and a nanometer of patience?

Hux scowls and suckles down a quarter of his gifted coffee.

Ben slips inside, a small wellspring of optimism flooding his system as he shuts the door softly.

He hadn't slept much the night before, partially due to nauseous guilt over what Snoke had compelled him to do, and partly because he had formulated this plan to try to win back what small chance he'd felt he had with his intriguing neighbor.

Following him to the table, Ben resists the urge to sit beside Hux, and instead takes a chair across from him. He is no more settled in his seat, ready to take another drink of coffee, then Hux's orange tabby has leapt from the floor to the table to stare suspiciously at him, ears perked forward and green eyes round. Her tail undulates like a snake.

"Good morning," he says to her, and slips a hand into the pocket of his pants to retrieve his secret weapon. It is a mouse, filled with catnip, that he'd gotten at the store the night before along with ingredients for breakfast. He dangles it by the tail in front of Millie's face.

Millie’s eyes widen and she pounces on the mouse, pressing her small white paws down with the force of a tigress. She arches her back before flopping over, lolling along her spine as she swats at her prey in soft, pliant mewls. Hux observes her manic spirit and presses a finger to her nose. It earns him an unflinching bite as Millie playfully gnaws on his finger, and he flicks his eyes to Ben.

“Her Highness is most pleased,” he mutters, sipping hard from the coffee.

Ben tempers the grin that threatens to transform his lips, worried he'll look too pleased with himself for this success, and instead reaches for the bag. He extracts two white Styrofoam cartons, and hands one to Hux. Keeping the other for himself, he digs out silverware wrapped in paper napkins, and a bottle of maple syrup.

“I wasn’t sure what cats ate for breakfast,” he jokes, not entirely meaning Millie.

“Unflinching loyalty. Dog innards. A portion of my bank account,” Hux says, reaching for the maple syrup.

Ben watches as Hux tucks into the breakfast, applying syrup to the neat stack of pancakes as he crunches at a piece of bacon. Spearing eggs with his fork, he consumes those too as though the man has not eaten in a week. All of this he does while not looking at Ben, so Ben takes the opportunity to look at him.

Gone is his neat appearance, in favor of rumpled hair sticking out in all directions, which Ben finds he much prefers. He is wearing pajama pants and a wrinkled Columbia t-shirt, and the sunlight that streams through his window turns his eyelashes to that pale gold that Ben finds so alluring. It also brings out the freckles, not as prevalent in the dim First Order bar or in dark alleyways at two am. He is, Ben decides in that moment, the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. So much so, that Ben completely forgets to open his own tray of breakfast.

Hux meanwhile shovels the food gracelessly, unsure about when his last substantial meal had been. Between lab, classes, his thesis and the First Order, he runs purely off adrenaline and caffeine. He is dimly aware that his self-care is abysmal, but only the weak willed have a mind for sleep and food. While he may not be accessing REM cycle sleep, the human body, his namely, can sustain itself off minimal hours and a specific caloric intake.

Ben finally wrenches his gaze away when he finds himself beginning to imagine the slight redhead without the shirt, and then with less clothing, and he swallows, opening his own tray of breakfast. He plucks a blueberry muffin out and takes a bite, then sips his coffee, wondering how he's managed to get into this predicament.

Hux is undeniably attractive, but Ben has been around attractive men most of his life, some with his persuasions and some not, and yet he has never felt so desperately compelled to be close to one. To possess one. Sure, there were occasional flings during downtime in the States, and once he'd even thought he was in love, but that had ended badly when Ben had found out the other man was both married and the father of two children, and Ben was nothing more than a piece of ass on the side.

Rey had told him before he was attracted to the kind of men he couldn't have: married ones, straight ones, the comrades during wartime that duty and honor forbade him from pursuing. Is Hux one of these unobtainables? Is that why he wants him so much, when he honestly barely knows a thing about him? Or is this chemistry? That mysterious thing he's never been sure he would know that now pummels him with such force he hardly has an appetite for the food he forces down.

Hux finally chances a glance at Ben and clears his throat when he meets those large almond eyes.

“Thanks,” he says, slackening as he drags fingertips along Millie’s coat. She’s undulating with deep purrs, sprawled out and pawing between the tongue-tied neighbors.

Ben offers him a smile, and stirs his scrambled eggs around in his carton, spearing a few but not lifting the fork to his mouth because Hux's bright green gaze makes his stomach flip.

"You're welcome," he says. "I was kind of hoping we could um.... start over."

It was a risk to say it, but it just sort of tumbles out, because he wants so much to take back the last forty-eight hours; he wants to go back to that alley, when Hux had been close enough to touch, agreeing to go out with him. Before he'd fucked it up.

Hux flushes and jerks his head away. He scratches at his neck and damns his complexion, though ultimately shakes his head.

“We can be civil. We should be, after all. Neighbors, coworkers. If that’s alright.”

Ben sits in silence for a moment, watching the flush crawl along Hux's cheeks. Embarrassed. Hux is embarrassed that some washed up soldier with a mutilated face whose future includes being a flunky for a seedy lech is actually in his kitchen attempting to pretend he's good enough for him. Ben suddenly feels colossally foolish for thinking there was anything to regain, and realizes that Hux probably just told him he'd meet Ben for dinner to get him to leave him the fuck alone.

His fingers tremble around his fork, and Ben's impulse, at first, is to slam the box closed and flee to his apartment and dump all of it in the trash, then put his fist through his wall.

But civil people don't behave that way. And besides, he tells himself through the immense disappointment that feels too large to apply to this situation that was never really... anything... it is not as though Hux is the only man in New York City.

And so he picks at his breakfast a little more purposefully, and manages to swallow a bite.

"Phasma and I are having some people over tonight," he tells Hux, because it is civil conversation. "If you'd like to come by. "As our neighbor."

Hux shifts his gaze back to Ben’s. He opens his mouth to quash the invitation with some academic excuse, when he glances down at Millie. She is the only bulwark of companionship that stands between him and bone-deep loneliness these days, and he swallows down his refusal.

“Are you going to be playing The Clash the entire time?” he sighs. It is a civil question, asked without _too_ much disdain, because they are civil men and this is a (relatively) civil morning.

Ben's eyes flicker up from his breakfast to relight on Hux's, and he tries to quell the electric flurry of hope. Hux sounds resigned, not interested.

"I have a wide range of tastes," he says, then adds hastily: "In music." _What the fuck was wrong with him?_

Hux lifts a brow, and a corner of his mouth with it. “Oh? Enlighten me,” he purrs in octave with the orange tabby between them.

That tone makes Ben want to tell Hux of the things he imagines in the darkness of his room at night, to reveal his fantasies. Instead he cuts off a bite of pancake, forces himself to finish it before saying:

"Classic rock, British invasion, blues, old country. That's what I taught myself to play listening to."

“I see,” Hux stabs a bite, twirling the fork between his fingers. “And your other tastes?”

Ben stares at him in confusion blending with raw desire, wanting to believe the redhead is flirting with him, but feeling sure he must not be. Not after the way he seemed so embarrassed that Ben displayed interest in him. _That_ kind of interest. The kind that makes him want to say his tastes are tall and narrow, and waists that fit easily into his hands. Pert asses that beg to be palmed in their tailored pants. Freckles that dust over fine collarbones, and hair Ben wants to fist as those pretty lips sink down over his cock.

He realizes belatedly that as he's thinking this, his eyes are trailing absently over Hux, thoughts stimulated by each vision. Even Millicent has paused in playing with her new toy and is sitting up, head swiveling between them, ginger hair floofed as though reacting to some electrical current.

Finally, Ben clears his throat.

"I, um... should think at least some of them are obvious," he says, holding Hux's gaze with purpose. Then he adds in an attempt at subtlety, however terrible he is at it: "You saw my book collection, after all."

Hux’s chest constricts as he holds Ben’s gaze, willing himself defiant. His complexion betrays him once more, fanning across his cheekbones and bleeding down his throat. He’s not blind to an expression of open desire, the way that Ben’s pupils are blown, black conquering brown – no, hazel, flecked with spots of green in the sixty degree angle of nine am sunlight – and Hux smirks. Stripped down, even with bacon and black coffee and Ben Solo’s burning stare, he is still a man of observation.

“What time is your party?”

Ben takes a swallow of coffee, eyes not leaving Hux’s. “Seven.”

* * *

Hux raps his knuckles on the door of 4A at precisely seven o’clock Eastern Standard Time. He immediately considers turning around, knowing full well that he is too early despite the given start date, because no one in their right mind shows up to a party on time. Regardless, Hux will never be able to find it in himself to arrive late to an event, determining that he looks sharp enough to bury the famed idiom. Fashionable indeed, with his tailored slacks and a crisp, tucked button-up, though he flares with a moment of panic and wonders if he’s overdressed for a Lower East Side nest known for its noise and chaos. He turns on his heel, wishing he’d downed more than the two bourbon shots before traversing the four and a half steps across the hall.

The door opens on the second click of Hux's shoe, and there is a soft sound of unguarded, masculine appreciation behind him.

"That's a view I could open my door to any day," Ben's voice drawls.

There is the sound of music, several voices: one is higher pitched, laughing. Also, the rattling of electronic gunfire. Even if arriving precisely on time, Hux is not the first person there.

Hux pauses in his tracks and glances back at Ben. He blinks, lips curling with a smirk.

“You’ve fine taste.”

Ben is leaning against the door frame, a craft beer bottle in one hand. He is dressed improperly for the weather outside, with a black tank top and jeans, but the temperature in this building did tend to run high. It accentuates those large shoulders, and gives Hux a glimpse at another scar he has not seen.

His neighbor's eyes are bright, not dulled with drink, but happy perhaps, and he smirks at Hux’s comment.

"You're not leaving are you?" Ben asks coyly. "You haven't even gotten here yet."

Hux turns to face him, crossing his arms. “I’d like a drink.”

Ben’s eyes rake over him, drinking in his crisp shirt, his narrow frame, his feisty countenance. “You can have anything you want,” he says, stepping back and pushing the door completely open.

Hux accepts the invitation, walking past him with a ghost of amusement touching his mouth. “Kind lad,” he murmurs, brushing their shoulders as his eyes pierce Ben’s.

Ben resists a very primitive urge to link his arm around that slender waist and spin Hux against his chest, and lean down to taste that faint hint of bourbon on his lips. He lets him pass, however, reveling in the way that Hux touches him deliberately.

Shutting the door behind them, he takes a few long strides into the kitchen which serves as their bar at the moment, with a sink full of ice, stuffed with beers, and a montage of mismatched bottles of various liquors. They circumvent Rey, Finn, and Poe who are sprawled in the floor playing _Left 4 Dead 2_. Phasma is standing with another woman, both of them on the phone, and Johnny Cash is playing softly.

Turning to see if Hux is still following, Ben grasps a bottle of Hux's apparent beverage of choice. "This good?"

Hux nods and leans against the counter, eyes raking across the environment and drinking in the atmosphere. He returns his gaze to Ben and observes each clumsy step that culminates in his fixed drink. Ben’s arm ripples with dark ink, and Hux attempts to glean any meaningful patterns, only managing to discern several icons of spirituality.

“Thanks,” he repeats for the second time that day when Ben hands him the drink.

“You’re welcome,” Ben echoes, and dares to inch closer than he needs to in order to place the drink in Hux’s grasp.

“I’m glad you came.” His eyes drift lazily to Hux’s lips as he says this, then he takes a drink of his beer.

Hux shrugs and casts his gaze away. “I will admit I wouldn’t have been inclined to come had I known your cousin would be here,” he raises his upper lip.

Ben’s gaze flicks across Hux’s shoulder to the living room, where Rey is laughing. The door opens, and more voices flood the room, drowning her out.

“Rey is just protective. She’s a good person.”

Hux pitches daggers at her with a glare and presses the glass to his lips. Another vice, another oral fixation. He uses it as a shield between him and Ben, as he’d done two nights before with the burning end of a cigarette.

“Don’t you have anyone that would claw someone’s eyes out for you?” Ben asks, attempting a smile that falters when he realizes that Hux might not, in fact, have anyone.

Hux’s own eyes slide over him like boiling water. “If someone warranted their eyes getting clawed out, I would do it myself.”

Ben gazes at him, then nods. “I believe that.” Impulsively, he reaches out, smoothes the back of a finger down a crease in Hux’s shirt, along his belly.

“Don’t be pissed off already. You just got here. Please?” He uses soft words, placating.

Hux instinctively wants to smack his wrist away, though he inhales sharply. The knuckle is rough even through the fabric, scabbed over, and Ben’s tone is honey that sinks into his bitter core. “Fine,” he relents on a thick swallow.

Ben sucks in a breath through his nostrils, letting himself drift closer, mind full of thoughts like _soft,_ and _small_ and _warm._ He actually hooks a finger over the hem of Hux's pants to pull him to him to kiss him, but Phasma steps through the door at that moment.

"Well. Look at you two fucks."

Ben flinches away from his prey, or his predator, he is not sure which, and offers Phasma a weak smile pained with the fact that he thinks his dick is half hard just from touching Hux.

"Phasma."

Hux flushes a brilliant shade of crimson and lurches violently away from Ben. He clacks the tumbler against his teeth and sucks down half its contents, refusing to look at either of them.

Phasma glances knowingly at both of them, dipping into the fridge to snag several bottles of beer. She leaves them alone once more in the kitchen.

Ben drains his beer bottle and sets it on the counter, opting for something stronger this time. He pours a bourbon, and offers to refill Hux's glass.

Hux hands it to him willingly. “Thanks.”

Ben tilts the bottle over Hux's tumbler, then sets it aside, taking a sip. "Should we... go socialize? Or..?" _Go back to your place and strip so I can see every last inch of your body on display, and touch you everywhere, and feel your mouth on mine._

Hux blinks, and his eyes drip down to Ben’s plush lips. His tongue feels swollen, too fat, too wet inside his mouth as four drinks worth of bourbon seeps into his bloodstream and sets fire to his face.

“Er,” he shrugs, pulling from the tumbler.

Christ. The shit bourbon is smoother.

Ben sighs, though he smiles, and drifts toward the open arch of the kitchen door, propping himself against the frame as though holding it open for Hux. His eyes gaze longingly at him, and he feels like he is in fact thirteen, and having his first crush. And for what reason? Hux has been almost nothing but dismissive and unkind; is Rey correct? Does Ben seek attention from people that do not wish to give it? She has expounded at length upon this, suggesting it reflects on Ben's inability to receive the attention he wanted from his parents, and that he is repeating that process.

At the moment, however, with alcohol warming him and Hux's presence merely intensifying every sensation, he doesn't care. He waits for Hux to slip past him, and then follows him into the party.

*****

How many hours have passed, Ben doesn't know. There have been several trips back to the kitchen for refills, all of which Ben has graciously provided for the guest he is most happy to have tonight. Over the course of the evening, they have gone from standing about awkwardly, at arm's length from one another in the burgeoning crowd, to where they have settled now

Side by side on the couch, Ben has just finished playing a song on the guitar to hand it off to Rey, who begins picking Fleetwood Mac and singing in her sweet voice: a far cry from The Clash. Hux is tucked onto the couch next to him, thighs touching, and Ben feels so comfortable he could almost reach out, slip fingers between those knees, act as possessive as he feels.

But then he thinks about Hux's comment about clawing eyes out, and resists. Instead, he glances at him, noting the warm flush in his cheeks, the relaxed expression that makes him blindingly beautiful, and asks:

"So? As bad as you thought?"

Hux glances at him and feels like he’s drowning in amber. Amber fucking eyes, amber fucking swill, both coiling in his belly and setting him aflame. He takes another sip and it burns a path down his throat. “It’s alright,” he admits, the liquor heavy on his tongue, thick in his head.

Ben’s own gaze settles on Hux’s, Breandán’s, and wishes he could whisper that name in the dark just to him. His own skull feels full of warm light, fuzzy, but not muddled.

“So… do you forgive me yet?”

“I suppose,” he sighs.

Ben shifts down on the couch, propping his long legs on the coffee table, and not bothering to disguise that he is settling closer to Hux.

“And what does your forgiveness include?”

Hux snorts. “My proximity. My very presence.”

Ben huffs a laugh, drags on a beer. “You are stone cold, you know that?”

“I’m aware,” he chuckles. The warmth of Ben’s shoulder pressing against his is conciliating, or perhaps it’s the warmth of his sixth (seventh?) drink that sweeps through his slackening posture.

Ben absorbs the warmth offered through the thin covering of Hux's shirt. The living room is filled: Phasma's friends, a few regulars from the First Order: even Mitaka, doing his best to blend in and chat with his third beer (in four hours).

Rey is cross-legged in the floor between the coffee table and the TV, sitting in front of them, plucking away at the strings of Ben's acoustic guitar. Finn has his head in her lap, and Poe leans against her back, smoking a joint. She is singing _Landslide_ , and Ben is mesmerized by her sweet voice, by the words.

_Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?_

_Can the child within my heart rise above?_

_And can I sail through the changing ocean tides,_

_Can I handle the seasons of my life?_

_Oh, oh I don't know, oh I don't know._

He is muddled, surely, for he absently reaches over and finds Hux's fingers. He doesn't grab them, or twine them, but just brushes them. Offering.

Hux freezes, suddenly nauseous with this saccharine debacle as it’s stuffed down his throat. He yanks his hand away and pushes off the couch, attempting to right himself for balance. Without looking back he shoots a path for the kitchen and grasps the bottle of bourbon left out. He scratches at the label in anxious habit, suddenly willing himself to leave.

Rey's song staggers as Hux flees the room, stepping over Finn and startling her, and she catches Ben's eyes. She rolls hers up with a smile, and then flicks them toward the kitchen with a gesture of her chin, and goes back to her music.

Ben levers himself up out of the overstuffed couch, weaving through the people filling his apartment, and follows Hux into the kitchen. He is poised there over the counter with a bottle of bourbon in one hand, a narrowly filled glass in the other, but otherwise frozen.

A thousand things fly through Ben's mind. _What is wrong? What did I do? Are you okay?_

He says none of this, but simply steps up behind him, shoves his glass down on the counter, and wraps his arms around that perfect, narrow waist. Because he can't stand it anymore.

Hux's body molds against him so perfectly: ass fitting just into the crook of Ben's hips, shoulders pressing back just against his chest. Neck warm and soft as he leans in and presses his lips to it, finding that pulse point, needing it. Needing him not to flee.

Hux audibly gasps and the shudder tears down his spine, rooting him in place. He feels utterly surrounded, possibly even overwhelmed, engulfed by Ben’s arms and Ben’s scent and Ben’s maddening fucking heat. Hux whimpers when those plush lips press against his pulse, and with his heart in his throat he clutches onto the shaking bottle like a crutch.

Ben reaches up and slowly traces delicate fingers along Hux's arm, finding the fingers grasping the bottle of bourbon and closing over them. He nudges Hux's arm down, until the bottle is on the counter, and then his lips are on his jaw, his ear.

He whispers: "I want you."

Hux makes a small noise, suddenly so enclosed by Ben Solo that he wonders how it would feel to be fully consumed, tongue buried in his mouth, cock pulsing deep inside him until he’s filled and used and shaking apart on a sob and a prayer. His skin is ablaze, broiling down to the ribs, and Hux shivers for each kiss until his hand steadies.

Ben places a hand on his hip, and slowly guides him around, so they are facing one another.

“Kiss me.”

Hux shakes his head, eyes cast downward.

“Why not?” Alcohol floods his perception, and suddenly it’s his scarred face, his failure as a person, that is coloring Hux’s answer.

“Too messy,” Hux murmurs, cheeks hot.

Ben’s eyes flick down to Hux’s lips, farther along his crisp button up, to his flat belly. Then he wrenches them back to Hux’s pale green eyes. “What if I like messy?” he purrs.

Hux squirms beneath the weight of his gaze, heat slicing through his ribs that settle in a tight pull on his stomach. He feels too small against Ben’s chest, engulfed in every which way and stewing in a queer blend of reverential envy. It’s nearly ridiculous; those enormous shoulders crowding him, thick fingers tugging his hips forward when he finally obliges with a noise of hollow defeat.

Amber. Fucking amber, pouring in like wells of oil, seeping into every orifice that festers like slick poison between his bones. Though it hardens inside him, filling up all the spaces carved deep by loneliness, and perhaps it’s the decent bourbon, or perhaps that melancholic amber stare closing in, but he suddenly feels whole.

“Give me your mouth,” he begs, and Ben’s eyes widen.

Ben obeys with a whine, planting a warm kiss to Hux’s jaw and dipping down to ghost a breath along the hollow of his throat. A small whimper cracks from deep within Hux when Ben flattens his tongue and carves a thick, wet stripe up to his ear. He feels claimed, helpless, six drinks in and too far deep to not give every piece of himself to Ben Solo, right here in this very moment. He gasps again at the subtle graze of teeth, cock trapped beneath thin fabric, pulsing against Ben’s thigh.

“B--Ben,” he rasps. His voice is thick, spilling out in hot breaths as thoughts of this needy, gentle beast losing every inch inside him send twin throbs of heat down his spine.

“Please, I -– I need,” he begs, tongue suddenly dry.

Perhaps he could lick Ben’s mouth open, lap up every inch --  

“Aw _yeah_ ,” a sharp whistle slaps Hux out of his delirium and he freezes, Ben with him.

The cement inside him cracks apart, returning to the state of oil that sends anxiety spiking down his sternum. He whips his head violently, eyes wide, to find Poe stabbing him with a lopsided grin.

His eyes are creased, red, as the stoned bastard plucks Cheetos out from a bag with a pair of orange-dusted chopsticks. “That’s good. This is good,” he nods, as if to assuage, and Hux finds himself shoving Ben away in blind rage.  

Perhaps it’s the shit bourbon (nearly ten ounces of it sloshing inside him), or perhaps that mawkish amber stare (burned shamefully into his optic nerves), but he tears out of apartment 4A like a fleeing creature, face aflame as he runs from Ben Solo and his pleas, his giant fucking eyes, far too vulnerable as each kiss now burns like a sore along his throat.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated! Come join us on Tumblr: 
> 
> [kyluxinferno](http://www.kyluxinferno.tumblr.com) (who writes as Hux)
> 
> [kyluxtrashcompactor](http://www.kyluxtrashcompactor.tumblr.com) (who writes as Ben)


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